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Chapter 1: What is the current state of Arctic sea ice and its significance?
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At the end of May, environment editor Damien Carrington travelled very far north to the Arctic Circle.
It was a small Inuit village in a territory called Nunavut, so about 17 degrees north, roughly.
It was, as you'd imagine, pretty remote.
Cambridge Bay is a very small place, about 1,500 people. These kind of weatherized houses on stilts, one shop, one cafe, and a lot of rocks.
But it was a good time to go. The temperatures were just above zero.
The sea ice was still there, but starting to melt, which is what this story is all about.
Damien had gone to meet Real Ice, a company with an audacious ambition.
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Chapter 2: What ambitious project aims to refreeze the Arctic ice?
But in the short term, it's actually surprisingly little energy. So they pumped 50,000 tonnes of water onto the ice over the winter. And I think that was using six or eight pumps. Each of these pumps has less power than a toaster. Right. It's not a powerful pump. It's not using a lot of energy. And it sounds counterintuitive given that enormous amount of water.
But the explanation is that you're not moving it very far. You're moving it from sort of just below the ice until just on top of the ice. So, you know, maybe a meter or two. Listen, there's lots of questions around the feasibility of this project, particularly around scale and accessibility. But I think energy is probably isn't one to worry about so much.
And so, Damien, you said that they had managed to add 50 centimetres of ice on top of what was already there. So maybe you can talk me through the kind of results that they've seen. That sounds pretty good. But how big is this project? I mean, what kind of area are they doing this over?
It's a question of perspective. So on one level, it's quite big. It's 450 metres by 450 metres. You stand there and you can see it. It's very striking on the ice. I was there just at the right time, just as the ice was starting to melt. So you could see the blue meltwater forming all around it and you end up with this kind of island of white. You could see it from the drone.
I saw it on the plane as I flew out. You can see it in satellite pictures. It was impressive. On the other hand, the Arctic is a gigantic place, and I think every year the long-term trend is we're losing about 80,000 kilometres squared of Arctic sea ice in the summer. So compared to that, it's pretty tiny, but that's the point of it. It's meant to be an experiment just to see how feasible it is.
There's still lots of things they need to work out.
You mentioned that this ice has kind of a different quality to naturally formed ice. Tell me a bit about that.
Well, there was one thing that surprised them, which is that the artificial ice, if you want to call it that, the ice that they'd thickened by pumping the water on top of, turned out to be brighter than the naturally forming ice. And they don't really know why that is. The theory, one theory at least, is that because it's frozen very quickly...
normal sea ice just forms very gradually as the sea slowly freezes as winter comes on and it gets cold you know but here they're just pumping up all this water and if it freezes quite quickly it might freeze more air bubbles within it which would make it more opaque and therefore more reflective another little bonus actually which is worth mentioning is that
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Chapter 3: Why is the melting of Arctic ice a major concern for climate change?
I mean, they chose the site in collaboration with the Inuit hunters so that there aren't bears and seals in that location, but obviously you can do it on a larger scale. There's also kind of microbes and plants and all sorts of things that you're kind of pumping up on top of the ice, and they still have to do the work on that. Does it affect the ecology?
And then there's this kind of moral hazard argument, which is that if you are saying that there's going to be a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card, you know, our geoengineering will solve our problems, it will put the emergency brake on, we don't need to worry about
cutting emissions and things like that so i mean of course i put all these questions to all the people involved in the project they're really well aware of it but my experience having reported on geoengineering for a while is that the scientific community is split you know some people think that it is worth doing the research we need to know what is so dangerous that we should never even go near it we need to know you know how you might go about something if at some point in the future society decided that things were getting really bad that we might want to do something
I mean, certainly all the people involved in the project, absolutely clear that cutting emissions is the number one priority. That's what we've got to do. But this is about trying to research and provide information about other alternative ways of doing things should people want to engage with that in the future.
And finally, Damien, you know, you've been there yourself. You've seen this incredible landscape. You've seen how, you know, important it is to local communities, to the wildlife and frankly, to all of us globally. What did you end up thinking about the Arctic and this project to try and refreeze it?
On a personal level, I really felt just blessed to be there because it's such a beautiful, kind of serene, amazing environment. I also thought I was glad these people were there doing this work. It's kind of a long shot. Everyone acknowledges that. Sometimes long shots work out and it could be really useful.
And I think, you know, from everybody I spoke to, not just the team themselves, but some independent scientists who were there as well, they seem to be going about it in a really good way, doing it step by step, responsibly, really engaged with the local community. Doing my job is often like kind of reporting on the four horsemen of the apocalypse, you know, each one day by day.
So going to see something kind of positive and, you know, guardedly hopeful felt really good too.
Well, Damien, thank you so much for telling us about this fascinating project.
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