Can We Thicken Arctic Sea Ice?

Speaker: Jacob Pantling, Centre for Climate Repair
Series: Quantitative Climate and Environmental Science Seminars

Arctic sea ice is melting rapidly and the first ice-free/blue Arctic (< 1 million square kilometres of sea ice extent) is likely to occur by 2050 regardless of emission scenario. The ice is incredibly important to the lives of people living in the Arctic for travel, fishing and hunting as well as to the survival of wildlife such as caribou, seals and polar bears. As the sea ice has continued to form later and melt earlier there has been an increase in, sometimes fatal, accidents on the thinner sea ice. A white ice-covered Arctic also reflects a significant fraction of summer solar radiation back into space and as the ice disappears dark ocean is exposed which absorbs this radiation leading to further heating so more melting with the feedback loop being a key contributor to Arctic Amplification and causing increased global warming.

The importance of the sea ice on all these levels and the risk of it disappearing even with rapid emissions reduction and scaling of greenhouse gas removal means there is increasing interest in techniques to directly protect the sea ice. The two methods investigated here involve pumping of seawater on top of the ice to thicken it directly by bypassing the natural ice’s insulating effect; “Surface Thickening”. Or to flood the snow on top of sea ice, converting it to more conductive ‘snow ice’ thereby increasing the rate of natural freezing, “Snow Flooding”. These techniques and their impact on the growth of sea ice has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Experiments both from both the lab and field experiments are presented together with modelling showing the impact of the techniques on ice thickness and how the end of winter thickness can be increased.