The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ May Flood the Earth. Can a 50-Mile Wall Cease It?

This month, a world staff of scientists has been making an attempt to arrange sensors on and round Thwaites Glacier, probably the most unstable on this planet. It’s typically known as Antarctica’s “doomsday glacier” as a result of, if it collapses, it will add two ft of sea-level rise to the world’s oceans. On Thwaites itself, a part of the staff will strive at present to drop a fiber-optic cable via a 3,200-foot borehole within the ice, close to the glacier’s grounding line, the place the ocean is consuming away at it from beneath. Sometime within the subsequent week, one other a part of the staff, working from the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon, goals to drop one other cable, which a robotic will traverse as soon as a day, right down to a rocky moraine within the Amundsen Sea. The information the sensors collect over the following two years will fill gaps in primary scientific information about Thawaites. They may even decide the way forward for an audacious concept to gradual its demise.

Right now, heat water is barely cresting the moraine, then flowing down a seabed canyon towards the glacier. If this pure dam have been a bit of taller, it may block these heat ocean currents. Using the information on present speeds and water temperatures, scientists and engineers will mannequin whether or not an enormous curtain atop the moraine may divert heat water away from the glacier’s base—and if it will even be doable to assemble one.

To avert disaster on this manner can be an enormous enterprise: The curtain itself would have to be as much as 500 ft tall and 50 miles lengthy. But these native situations are in such tentative stability—“on a knife’s edge,” David Holland, a local weather scientist at NYU and a member of the Seabed Curtain Project, advised me from the deck of the RV Araon—that Holland and another scientists imagine that an intervention may change the glacier’s destiny. Of his colleagues on the boat, he often is the just one considering alongside these strains proper now, he stated. “But everyone’s data is going to be used by people for years and years for that purpose.”

A couple of years in the past, the curtain challenge was a fringe concept that John Moore, a glaciologist on the University of Lapland, and a few like-minded colleagues had proposed in a collection of educational articles. This sort of geoengineering, meant to handle the signs of local weather change with out slowing it down, was a bête noire within the glaciology group. Now extra scientists are coming to see focused interventions in our local weather as inevitable. The curtain challenge and at the least one competing concept for slowing Thwaites’s soften have raised hundreds of thousands of {dollars}—not simply from the standard geoengineering proponents however from conventional philanthropic foundations.

“The idea that there’s a clean exit on climate change, people need to get over that,” Holland stated, earlier than he set out on the icebreaker. “What is the least brutal outcome for the world is what will be decided.”

Geoengineering—which may additionally embrace eradicating carbon dioxide from the ocean and utilizing stratospheric aerosol injection to dim the solar—is gaining adherents partially as a result of decarbonization merely isn’t continuing rapidly sufficient. This previous fall, the United Nations introduced that throughout the subsequent decade, international temperatures will seemingly rise by greater than 1.5 levels Celsius above preindustrial ranges, a threshold that the Paris Agreement aimed to keep away from. At the identical time, local weather impacts are getting actual—droughts are supercharging hearth seasons; hotter seas are intensifying hurricanes.

Marianne Hagen, a former Norwegian deputy minister of international affairs, advised me that she’d lengthy thought of geoengineering “science fiction and just something not worth spending a lot of time on.” Then she watched because the Ukraine conflict modified the conversations round her: Energy safety got here to the forefront of European politics, and “nobody talked about energy transition anymore.” She considered the susceptible coastal nations she’d visited as a authorities official and, in 2024, signed on to co-lead the curtain challenge with Moore. “I ended up in John’s camp, mostly out of despair, because I could not see a safe pathway forward for future generations without doing the necessary research on these Band-Aid, buy-time solutions,” she stated.

After that, the challenge rapidly raised preliminary analysis funding from the nonprofits Outlier Projects, run by a former Meta government, and the Tom Wilhelmsen Foundation, based by a outstanding Norwegian transport firm. Although authorities companies within the United States and United Kingdom have funded lab analysis on geoengineering, wealthy patrons have been comparably highly effective funders of geoengineering typically—and the first funders of polar-geoengineering analysis. “There are lots of people with lots of money, and it’s in the scale of the private sector to do this,” Holland advised me.

Another group, the Arête Glacier Initiative, is investigating the concept of refreezing Thwaites to bedrock by pumping lubricating meltwater out from its base or drawing warmth away with passive warmth pumps. An initiative known as Real Ice is making an attempt to pump seawater atop Arctic sea ice to thicken it. “We’ve found a lot of enthusiasm among the philanthropic community” for focused geoengineering interventions that might restrict injury to coastal communities, Brent Minchew, a geophysicist at Caltech and a co-founder of Arête, advised me. “These are very localized interventions for global benefits.”

Scientists agree that, absent intervention, Thwaites’s retreat will speed up throughout the subsequent century and the glacier will finally collapse. And Thwaites acts as a cork within the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which incorporates sufficient water to boost sea ranges by practically 17 ft. The worth of localized interventions at Thwaites, proponents say, pales as compared with the value of constructing seawalls round main cities. In one paper, Moore and two colleagues estimated that  the curtain may price $40 billion to $80 billion to put in (and $1 billion to $2 billion a yr to keep up), whereas adapting to rising sea ranges may price an estimated $40 billion a yr. One manner or one other, we’re going to must construct so as to combat the ocean.

But many within the science group nonetheless disagree, vehemently, each with geoengineering proposals and with the rationale for contemplating them in any respect. In a outstanding paper printed within the fall, the University of Exeter polar glaciologist Martin Siegert and 41 co-authors defined intimately how the curtain challenge, the kind of refreezing that Arête needs to strive, sea-ice thickening, and two different polar-geoengineering proposals can be too costly, technically unimaginable, and probably damaging to fragile ecosystems. The paper additionally raised a typical argument towards geoengineering—that pursuing these concepts is a harmful distraction from decarbonization, the most effective answer to local weather change.

Siegert determined to write down the paper, he advised me, after he was the only real dissenter at a chat on sea-ice thickening on the UN’s local weather convention in 2023. He was shocked how mainstream the once-fringe area had grow to be. To him, these concepts are so removed from possible, they provide a false hope that distracts from the required work of slicing again on fossil-fuel use to keep away from disaster. Ted Scambos, a glaciologist who co-led the main U.S.-U.Okay. collaboration that studied the mechanisms driving Thwaites’s retreat, advised me that he was as soon as tentatively supportive of geoengineering analysis however, on condition that the Trump administration has slashed funding for local weather science and renewable-energy improvement, is now strongly towards it. “We absolutely should not fund or support efforts, or even tests, of climate or ice loss mitigation methods,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It should be a matter of international law, and it should be set up as such immediately.” Instead, analysis and insurance policies ought to “remain laser-focused on reducing fossil fuel use” and on minimizing the associated financial impacts.

Those engaged on geoengineering analysis see opponents as equally shortsighted. Merely documenting modifications to the cryosphere is like “choosing the best seat on the Titanic to listen to the last tune of the orchestra as the ship goes down,” Moore stated. Studying geoengineering interventions is like “launching a few lifeboats.” At this level, decarbonization, even when it occurred tomorrow, wouldn’t essentially save Thwaites from collapse, he argued. “To decarbonize to the point at which we will be keeping the glaciers safe, you require actual magic to do that. It is delusional.”

Some proponents of initiatives like the ocean curtain argue that they’re not a novel class of environmental motion. They are an act of preservation not dissimilar from redirecting rivers and rebuilding seashores. Letting Thwaites collapse arguably violates the Antarctic Treaty System’s environmental-preservation clause, Minchew stated.

How far we’re prepared to go to maintain the cryosphere in a recognizable form whereas the world works on decarbonization is an open query. To geoengineering proponents, persuading the 29 member nations of the Antarctic Treaty with decision-making energy to attempt to construct a sea curtain appears to be like simpler than persuading the 193 members of the United Nations to, say, strive seeding the environment with sun-blocking chemical compounds. Opponents fear about breaking present environmental protections for the area, and endangering the treaty altogether. But Holland, at the least, is prepared to foretell the end result of those debates.

“Fast-forward 1,000 years, the Earth will be geoengineered,” he stated. “The entire climate will be regulated like a modern house—no question.” The local weather could get screwed up in new methods as scientists try to show the planet’s temperature dial down. But “if it survives, humanity is simply going to do this.”