The 'hydrological geoengineering' page title is set, and can only be changed by taking down the whole page. In any event, I think that hydrological is more appropriate, as it includes schemes like glacier seeding which aren't polar
I don't know about the pykrete fibre ratio, please feel free to research and correct any mistakes. I think that pykrete has some interesting applications. It could help insulate ice, stabilise ice sheets and may also have engineering benefits for the 'ice road truckers' and suchlike. A 2008/12/29 John Nissen <[email protected]>: > > Hi Andrew, > > 1. I think that "polar geoengineering" might be more appropriate than > "hydrological geoengineering". Hydrology suggests water resources, but we > want to concentrate on critical processes occurring principally in polar > regions, because here there are some of the most worrying tipping points > (indeed, I fear the Arctic sea ice is already tipping and could be near the > point of no return). I'm not sure we need a separate entry for this. > Saving the Arctic sea ice is a potential application of geoengineering; > similarly dealing with ice sheet meltwater and dealing with methane from > permafrost are potential applications of geoengineering. > > 2. I was fascinated when I heard about pykrete recently, and have been > thinking about possible applications for saving the Arctic sea ice. > > I've added an alternative idea for plugging the moulins, and that is using > pykrete, for which there is already a useful wikipedia entry: > www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete > > Ideally, the pykrete would be sprayed onto existing ice using a mixture of > fibrous material (such as sawdust) and near freezing or perhaps supercooled > water. It would be interesting to do some experimentation into whether such > a process could be developed. This would use a simple device like a > snowgun. > > About Pykrete itself, you say that the fibre/ice ratio is about 1:25, but > the pykrete entry says it is 45% fibre, 55% ice by weight. Which ratio is > correct? > > Also the picture of a pykrete block shows the block as dark brown, and not > reflecting like ice, as suggested with ref [3]. The advantage of having > floating rafts/islands of pykrete is that they would quickly get covered in > snow, and only melt slowly from below. Thus they would last throughout the > Arctic summer, if made thick enough. (Much of the thinning of the Arctic > sea ice is by melting from below.) > > If ice breakers were to spread sawdust in the freezing water behind them, > this might freeze directly into pykrete, and help preserve the ice to > increase the proportion of multi-year ice. Again some experimentation would > be interesting. > > There is an idea from Prof John Shepherd, who BTW is leading the RS > geoengineering study, to use a large number of ice breakers to plough up the > one-year ice, so the ice on either side of the channel left by the ice > breaker is thicker, and melts slower in the summer. > > Perhaps one could combine these ideas, both ploughing up the ice and forming > pykrete in the track left by the icebreaker. > > Cheers, > > John > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Andrew Lockley" <[email protected]> > To: "Geoengineering" <[email protected]> > Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2008 3:57 PM > Subject: [geo] hydrological geoengineering - new wiki page >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrological_geoengineering >> >> built by me using material from Alber Kallio >> >> Please edit at will >> >> >> >> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
