Scientists Propose to build 62-mile-long curtains around the 'doomsday glacier' to Save It

 

The Thwaites "Doomsday" glacier is unfreezing. At around the measurement of Florida, the ice shelf in Western Antarctica carries too much water that it will lead to increase the sea level by two feet on its own if it were to came apart.

Afraid that ongoing practices to decrease global warming won't be sufficient, geoengineers led by John Moore, a glaciologist at the University of Lapland in Finland, have introduced a grandiose and maybe hopeless idea to protect the Thwaites from unfreezing: covering the glacier with enormous, 62-mile-long curtains to retain the warm water.

The study is in its pre phase yet, but it's understandable that such project would be a monumental pledge, valued at a staggering $50 billion, Moore estimates.

"It seems like a hell," Moore us. "But differentiate between the risk-risk: the price of sea-level conservation all over the world, just coastal protections, is nearly about $50 billion per annum per meter of sea level hike."

What's primarily leading the doomsday ice sheet to melt is the warming of the ocean streams that batter it, rather than the ambient temperature of the region. 90 percent of global warming, in fact, occurs in the ocean.

Moore had recently introduced creating a wall in the surrounding Amundsen Sea to turn the warm currents. Since 2020, however, he recommended "seabed anchored curtains" because they could be more cheap to apply, and most of all, reversible should they have unpredicted results.

At present, Moore and a team of scientists at the University of Cambridge are trying a three-foot-long prototype in water tanks. In about two years, the moto is to scale up to a 33-foot-long curtain that they will test in a Norwegian fjord.

"We desire to understand, what could more likely go wrong? And if there's no solution for it, then in the last, you just have to surrender," Moore told us. "But there's also many reasons to struggle and make it possible."

The project has been suffered from criticism by researchers previously. Commonly, they claim that it's a band-aid solution that diverge from talking about the major issue of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions — never mind the logistical difficulties of creating such a colossal structure.

But Moore claims that any step must be taken now. In his perspective, we won't be capable to decrease the emissions rapidly enough to conserve the pivotal ice sheet.

 Study has introduced that massive breaks that are visible in the Thwaites glacier could speed up its melting, means its collapse could come closer than we imagined.

"The glacier doesn't actually worry anymore about what humans desire to do about their excretion," he told us. "At that moment, that's when you require these other equipment in the box."