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<https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-control-of-nature/a-heat-shield-for-the-most-important-ice-on-earth>
A
Heat Shield for the Most Important Ice on Earth Rachel Riederer 25/04/2023
------------------------------

On a clear morning in late March, in rural Lake Elmo, Minnesota, I followed
two materials scientists, Tony Manzara and Doug Johnson, as they tromped
down a wintry hill behind Manzara’s house. The temperature was in the high
thirties; a foot of snow covered the ground and sparkled almost unbearably
in the sunlight. Both men wore dark shades. “You don’t need a parka,”
Johnson told me. “But you need sunglasses—snow blindness, you know?” At the
bottom of the hill, after passing some turkey tracks, we reached a round,
frozen pond, about a hundred feet across. Manzara, a gregarious man with
bushy eyebrows, and Johnson, a wiry cross-country skier with a quiet voice,
stepped confidently onto the ice.

Manzara and Johnson wanted me to see the place where, in a series of
experiments, they had shown that it was possible to slow the pond’s yearly
thaw. Starting in the winter of 2012, working with a colleague named Leslie
Field, they had covered some of the ice with glass microspheres, or tiny,
hollow bubbles. Through the course of several winters, they demonstrated
that the coated ice melted much more slowly than bare ice. An array of
scientific instruments explained why: the spheres increase the ice’s
albedo, or the portion of the sun’s light that the ice bounces back toward
the sky. (Bright surfaces tend to reflect light; we take advantage of
albedo, which is Latin for “whiteness,” when we wear white clothes in
summer.)

At the edge of the pond, Manzara and Johnson started to reminisce.
Originally, they had applied glass bubbles to a few square sections of the
frozen pond, expecting that the brightest ice would last longest. But they
found that, beneath the pond’s frozen surface, water was still circulating,
erasing any temperature differences between the test and control sections.
In subsequent years, they sank walls of plastic sheeting beneath the pond’s
surface, and the coated ice started to last longer. At first, Johnson
manually measured the ice thickness by donning a wetsuit and snowshoes,
tying a rope around his waist, and walking onto the frozen surface with a
drill and a measuring rod; he was relieved when they figured out how to
take sonar measurements instead. Manzara directed my gaze to two trees on
opposite shores. “This is where we set up the flying albedometer,” he said.
An albedometer measures reflected radiation; theirs “flew” over the lake by
way of a rope strung between two pulleys. By this point, I had been staring
at the ice and snow for almost an hour, and my vision started to turn
purple-pink. I blinked hard as we headed inside.

Manzara, Johnson, and Field want to prove that a thin coating of reflective
materials, in the right places, could help to save some of the world’s most
important ice. Climate scientists report that polar ice is shrinking,
thinning, and weakening year by year. Models predict that the Arctic Ocean
could be ice-free in summer by the year 2035. The melting ice wouldn’t just
be a victim of climate change—it would drive further warming. The physics
seem almost sinister: compared with bright ice, which serves as a cool
topcoat that insulates the ocean from solar radiation, a dark, ice-free
ocean would absorb far more heat. All of this happens underneath the Arctic
summer’s twenty-four-hour sun. But the fragility of the Arctic cuts both
ways: as much as the region needs help, its ecosystems are sensitive enough
that large-scale interventions could have unintended consequences.

That afternoon, Field arrived at Manzara’s house from California, where she
runs a microtechnology-consulting company and teaches a Stanford course on
climate change, engineering, and entrepreneurship. Like an old friend, she
let herself in and called out hello. Field has let her shoulder-length hair
go completely silver, “in solidarity with the Arctic,” she joked; when we
sat down together, it was obvious that all three scientists relished
engineering challenges, from applying the glass bubbles (shake them out of
giant cannisters? spray them from a pressure pot?) to measuring their
effects. They are an inventive bunch. Both Johnson and Manzara were senior
scientists at 3M: Johnson, a physicist, worked on advanced materials such
as a high-capacity transmission cable, to stabilize electrical grids;
Manzara, an organic chemist, focussed on energetic materials, making
ingredients for flares and rocket propellants. Field holds more than sixty
patents; Johnson around twenty; Manzara around twelve.

Last year, Johnson, Manzara, Field, and other collaborators published a
paper
<https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022EF002883>
about their work at the test pond in *Earth’s Future*, a journal of the
American Geophysical Union. It described how they segmented the pond,
applied a thin layer of glass bubbles on one side, and set up instruments
to measure water temperature, ice thickness, weather, and long-wave and
short-wave radiation. Albedo measurements range from zero, for perfect
absorption, to one, for mirrorlike reflection; the bubbles raised the
albedo of late-winter pond ice from 0.1-0.2 to 0.3-0.4. After a February
snowfall, they wrote, it was impossible to see any difference between the
sections. But in March the snow thinned to reveal two distinct regions of
ice, which melted at different rates as the days warmed. When the bare ice
was gone, nine inches remained under the glass bubbles.
[image: Aerial image of an experiment testing glass beads' ability to keep
ice frozen longer]

An aerial view of the glass-bubble-covered ice, at left, and the bare ice.
Photograph by Doug Johnson

These results validated the notion that the glass bubbles could withstand
harsh winter weather and extend the life of ice. And although a freshwater
pond in Minnesota is not a perfect analogue for Arctic sea ice, the authors
argued, glass microspheres showed potential. “Ultimately, if policy
decisions were to be made that it was appropriate to apply this localized
ice-preserving approach on a local or regional scale, this method of
surface albedo modification may serve to leverage albedo feedback loops in
a low-risk, beneficial way to preserve Arctic ice,” they wrote.

The paper imagined deploying the glass bubbles in a few strategic places.
The Beaufort Gyre, for instance, north of Alaska and Canada, serves as a
nursery for sea ice. “The circulation patterns there would help you spread
the materials around,” Field told me. First-year ice is darker and thinner,
and therefore vulnerable; the glass bubbles could help it survive and grow
into thicker, brighter ice. Field also envisioned applying the bubbles in
the Fram Strait, east of Greenland and west of Svalbard, which traps ice
floes when it freezes over, helping them to survive longer. “There’s so
much ice export there. A flow restrictor would be a good thing,” Field said.

In the race to save the cryosphere, as scientists call the world’s frozen
reaches, protecting icy bodies of water will not be enough: the water
locked on land, in glaciers, could devastate ecosystems and lower Earth’s
albedo if it melts. And so, this winter, Johnson and Manzara constructed
four “glaciers” on Manzara’s property. We went to see them with Field,
stopping on the way to sample sweet sap from one of Manzara’s maple trees.

Already, through the course of the day, the snow had softened: instead of
crunching across the top, we sank to our shins with each step. The glaciers
sat, like ten-foot-square garden beds, behind a wire fence meant to keep
out turkeys and deer. Glass bubbles have proved surprisingly effective on
the flat surface of the pond, Manzara explained, but are not suited to the
flowing curves of glaciers. “On a sloped surface, they tend to run downhill
very quickly as soon as the top layer gets to be at all liquid,” he told
me. Instead, they were testing white granules commonly used in roofing,
which are heavier and irregular. But would they protect the ice as well as
the spheres—and would they stay in place long enough to save glaciers?

No amount of glass spheres or roofing granules will reverse climate change.
Only a rapid global shift away from fossil fuels is likely to achieve that.
But in a place like the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the
rest of the planet, and where the end-of-ice tipping point hangs like the
Sword of Damocles, such an intervention could offer a precious lifeline:
time. What kind of progress could the world make if the emergency receded
by a few years? “You only need to treat a small portion of the Arctic to
get a big impact on the global climate. That’s the big picture,” Johnson
said, describing his group’s modelling. “You can get twenty-five years
longer to keep the ice.”

In 2006, Field went to see Al Gore’s climate-change documentary
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/24/ozone-man> “An Inconvenient
Truth.” She remembers leaving the theatre with two feelings: panic, and the
need to do something. She kept thinking of an image she had once seen—a
truck barrelling toward a screaming woman who’s standing in front of a
child. “That’s what I felt like—like the Mack truck was coming for my
kids,” Field told me. She also thought about the idea, communicated in the
film, that the Arctic Ocean had enormous leverage in the climate system.
“That disappearing ice, that reflectivity that we’ve had, that’s been doing
us this gigantic favor of reflecting sunlight away, it’s disappearing—and
that makes this positive-feedback loop,” she said. As an engineer, she knew
that a positive-feedback loop, in which a change begets more of the same
change, was something special: an opportunity for a small, strategic input
to have a larger impact.

Field started experimenting with albedo on her front porch. She filled
buckets with water and various would-be heat shields, and rigged them with
inexpensive hardware-store thermometers. Her husband, a fellow-engineer,
thought the tests were overly simplistic. “I’ve learned to listen to his
arguments, but not to let them stop me,” Field told me. Plastics seemed
unsuitable—they’re derived from petroleum, and a stint in the oil industry
had convinced her that “you just have to respect the toxicity” of
petrochemicals—but she tried some anyway. She tried hay and daisies. “They
were both terrible,” she said. She tried cotton pads, baking soda,
diatomaceous earth, searching for a material with the right
properties—something reflective and nontoxic, that didn’t absorb heat, with
an open texture to allow evaporative cooling. In 2008, she formed Ice911, a
nonprofit, to fund her experiments.

Early in her research, Field learned that 3M was one of several companies
that manufacture glass microspheres by the trillions. Microspheres make
automotive parts lighter and reduce the density of wood composite, making
it easier to nail; if you’ve driven in the dark, you’ve seen the unique way
the material scatters light, in the reflective paint that’s used for lane
lines. In November, 2010, a professional acquaintance introduced Field to
Johnson, who invited her to give a talk at 3M’s Midwest headquarters, the
home of Scotch Tape, Post-it, and many cleaning, building, and business
supplies. On the way, she saw a rainbow and took it as an auspicious sign.
During her talk on Arctic ice loss, which about twenty scientists attended,
Field described a dilemma: she knew that the glass bubbles needed to be
tested in the field, but she also knew that it would be difficult to get
permission to conduct a scaled-up experiment. At the end of her
presentation, Manzara approached her and offered a solution—they could use
his pond, which is on private land.

A 3M policy allowed scientists to spend fifteen per cent of their work time
on personal projects, and Johnson, Manzara, and Field soon began testing
different glass bubbles on the pond. They contracted with an environmental
laboratory to feed the glass bubbles to one bird species and one fish
species, and the lab did not report any harmful effects. The team reasoned
that the microspheres were safe because they were almost entirely silica, a
mineral that is abundant in sediment, rocks, and the ocean. “It’s something
we’ve evolved with,” Field argued. “If you look at your vitamins, you may
find that some of them have a silica binding agent. It’s about as safe as
you can get.” Microspheres also have the advantage of already existing:
when tackling a problem that needs to be solved within ten or twenty years,
there’s hardly time to invent and mass-produce something entirely new.
“These are relatively inexpensive, and there are manufacturers,” Field told
me.

In 2015, Field gave a talk at *NASA*’s Ames Research Center and met its
associate director, Steven Zornetzer, a former neuroscientist interested in
climate protection. “Leslie’s insight was that, if we can use some kind of
material to really leverage the importance of ice in the Arctic during the
summer, we could prevent that additional absorption of solar radiation,” he
told me. Zornetzer, a hiker and environmentalist, joined the small team at
Ice911 as executive director to build up the organization’s infrastructure.
Covering up to a hundred thousand square kilometres of Arctic sea ice,
Zornetzer told me, would cost one to two billion dollars per year; Johnson
estimated that coating Himalayan glaciers would cost anywhere from one to
thirteen billion dollars per year. The group knew that their approach was
not a substitute for the larger undertaking of cutting climate pollution to
near-zero—but, like doctors in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic
<https://www.newyorker.com/tag/coronavirus>, they were raiding the medicine
cabinet. They wanted to find remedies that were already out there and which
might buy time for new treatments to be developed.

There were plenty of reasons that this intervention might be unworkable.
The microspheres might not affect Arctic sea ice the way they did a
segmented pond in Minnesota. Zornetzer said that scientists still needed to
study the bubbles’ impact on each part of the food chain, “from primitive
organisms to larger, more predaceous ones,” to insure that they would “have
no effect on species living in the Arctic water column.” Using them might
be politically impossible, whether locally or internationally. But the only
way to find out would be to press forward. Answers, positive or negative,
were needed soon.

In 2017, after several years of experiments in Minnesota, the team flew to
northern Alaska to test the microspheres on a pond at the Barrow Arctic
Research Center, in Utqiagvik
<https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/life-in-alaska-during-the-round-the-clock-darkness-of-polar-night>.
(Field’s first trip to Alaska had been funded by a Silicon Valley donor who
was concerned about the future of the Arctic.) The team applied the glass
bubbles with a modified agricultural seeder and a snow machine. To guard
against polar bears, men with rifles accompanied the group. Maddeningly,
the experiment was inconclusive—the instrumentation failed when its wiring
was gnawed by foxes—but the test put Ice911 into a new phase, in which the
organization began to grapple with complicated questions that surround
geoengineering.

Using bright materials to stay cool is intuitive enough. Drivers do it when
they place foil sunshades behind the windshields of their cars. Cities such
as New York and Los Angeles do it through “cool roof” programs, in which
reflective coats of paint keep buildings cooler during the summer, helping
to counteract the urban heat-island effect, which makes cities warmer than
natural spaces. In theory, these principles could be applied more broadly.
Research by Xin Xu, a materials scientist who trained at M.I.T., recently
estimated
<https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/105822/16-6158-1.pdf> that
raising an area’s albedo by 0.01 could reduce its air temperature by 0.1
degrees Celsius (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit). An organization called *MEER*,
founded by a Harvard microscope researcher, wants to combat warming by
placing mirrors over land and water and pointing them skyward, to bounce
back solar radiation. It’s possible that plants could be bred to have lower
levels of chlorophyll and waxier surfaces, which could increase the albedo
of croplands. But the idea of addressing climate change on a global scale,
by intentionally intervening in the natural world—as opposed to by
decreasing emissions—is deeply contentious. There are questions of safety,
efficacy, and unintended consequences. Even if a technology is definitely
safe, there are issues of governance and fairness: Who gets to decide to
deploy it, and where?

One particularly controversial form of geoengineering is stratospheric
aerosol injection—a type of solar-radiation management
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/dimming-the-sun-to-cool-the-planet-is-a-desperate-idea-yet-were-inching-toward-it>,
or S.R.M., that would raise the entire planet’s albedo by spraying
aerosolized sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, much as volcanoes do. In
2021, a Harvard group researching S.R.M. was poised to test the technology
in northern Sweden, working with the country’s space agency, but protests
from the Indigenous Sámi community and environmental groups shut the
project down. “The way of thinking that humans are entitled to change and
manipulate our surroundings has actually brought us into the climate crisis
in the first place,” a leader of the Sámi Council told reporters
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07072021/sami-sweden-objection-geoengineering-justice-climate-science/>
at the time. Still, this February, a U.N. Environment Programme report
argued that the impacts and risks of S.R.M. should be researched, in part,
the organization’s chief scientist has said
<https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/new-report-explores-issues-around-solar-radiation-modification>,
because “these technologies are gaining traction as a possible last
resort.” David Keith, who leads a new climate-systems-engineering
initiative at the University of Chicago and is one of the most cited
researchers of S.R.M., told me that the technology should not be used
unilaterally, for example by “a toxic tech billionaire.” But he also said
that universal agreement is unrealistic: “No technologies get decided by
some global unanimous vote.”

Keith told me that, in his view, research into the safety and efficacy of
glass microspheres is underwhelming, and that stratospheric aerosols are a
more mature and impactful technology. But advocates of reflective coatings
argue that their approaches would be preferable because they are localized,
and might be more easily reversed. “If something unexpected were to happen
in the environment as a result of our deployment, we could simply stop the
deployment,” Zornetzer told me. “We can even clean it up if we had to. You
can’t do that with these other methods.” Using reflective coatings on ice
still amounts to actively tinkering with a natural system, but in a way
that seems less totalizing than transforming the stratosphere—call it
geoengineering lite. (Some proponents, including Field, prefer the term
“climate restoration.”)

After the field test at Utqiagvik, the priorities of Ice911 team members
began to diverge. Field wanted to conduct more field tests as soon as
possible; this meant pivoting away from Arctic sea ice to glaciers, on the
theory that it would be easier to secure permits and community support on
land, within clear borders. Last year, she officially founded the Bright
Ice Initiative, a glacier-focussed group, and Johnson and Manzara came with
her. Others, including Zornetzer, thought that they had more work to do
before field testing, and wanted to stay focussed on Arctic ice, which they
viewed as the most important lever that a surface-albedo project could
pull. They ultimately renamed Ice911 the Arctic Ice Project and partnered
with *SINTEF*, a research organization in Norway, to complete laboratory
studies into the ecological impact of glass microspheres. Only after those
have concluded will testing move into the field. “We have always used the
phrase ‘Do no harm,’ ” Zornetzer told me. “But there was precious little or
no solid ecological or toxicology work associated with the
material—certainly not in the Arctic, with the species that live in the
Arctic water column.”

Many of those who oppose geoengineering argue that even discussing it
generates a sort of moral hazard, by creating a false impression that
technological fixes will spare us the hard work of dropping fossil fuels.
Manzara, Johnson, and Field aren’t convinced by that line of thinking.
“We’ve known about climate change and carbon for how long?” Manzara said.
“People are using solar, using renewables, but it’s not changing fast
enough. This is something you could actually do.” Other opponents point out
that even a test would be far-reaching and could pose serious risks.
“You’re not going to be able to see the implications of these technologies
until you deploy them at scale,” Panganga Pungowiyi, an organizer at the
Indigenous Environmental Network, and a Native resident of St. Lawrence
Island, in Alaska, told me. “And we only have one Earth.”

The Utqiagvik test opened both organizations up to outside criticism in a
new way. In 2022, a group of Native Alaskan activists, including Pungowiyi,
tried to attend an Arctic Ice Project fund-raiser at a country club in
California. After they paid for a V.I.P. table, their money was refunded
with a note saying that the event was sold out—but some of Pungowiyi’s
friends, who were white, were able to buy individual tickets later. The
group demonstrated outside instead, and delivered an open letter signed by
several Native Alaskan groups. It argued that the coatings might interfere
with wildlife, human health, boat motors, and air traffic.

Annette Eros, who became the C.E.O. of the Arctic Ice Project several
months after the fund-raiser, told me that the table had been refunded
because of space limitations. Still, she said, the decision not to
accommodate the group was “disappointing.” She added in an e-mail that “the
actions from last year do not reflect the philosophy and strategy of
current Arctic Ice Project leadership.” Eros also said that “Rule 1” of the
project is that it will collaborate with Indigenous communities well ahead
of field testing. “We need to make sure that we’re respecting and learning
from each other and have open lines of communication,” she said. But the
Arctic Ice Project has not reached out to the groups involved in the
protest.

Field told me that she had got permission for the Utqiagvik field test from
the local city government and the Native corporation, and thought those
agreements sufficed. “That is not the same as getting consent,” Pungowiyi
told me. When we spoke, Pungowiyi focussed on the matter of
self-determination. “Shouldn’t we be able to say no? Shouldn’t we have the
agency over our bodies, our lands, our waters, our animals that we’ve been
in relationship with for thousands of years?” she asked. In her view,
scientific projects have a long history of treating Indigenous people and
lands “as a stepping stool and a dumping ground.”

Geoengineering is powerful for the same reason that it is a lightning rod:
it contemplates profound changes to global systems. Of course, humans have
already disrupted those systems in dangerous ways. Action is risky, but so
is inaction; geoengineering highlights the tension between speed and
safety. Geoengineering also raises the question of whose safety counts.
Warming is a collective problem, but many communities that have emitted
less climate pollution—island nations, Indigenous communities, much of the
Global South—are already suffering the worst of its effects. Some will
suffer from climate solutions, too.

Well-meaning people may be tempted to view the climate crisis as a version
of the trolley problem, Pungowiyi said—a philosophical conundrum in which a
trolley is about to strike five people and an onlooker has to decide
whether to divert it onto a different track, where it will strike only one.
The trolley problem describes a single decision-maker with complete
information, but the climate crisis involves many decision-makers who must
account for uncertainty—and the will of the people on the tracks. “If you
have a technology that you believe is good for the whole world, then it’s
O.K. to sacrifice the Arctic because it’s the most strategic location, and
it’s wrong for Indigenous people to say no,” Pungowiyi said, describing a
line of reasoning that she considers deeply harmful.

The more time I spent with the Bright Ice team, the more conflicted I felt
about their technology. Field told me that she’d spoken at an online event
attended by the former President of Iceland Ólafur Grímsson, and he’d
remarked that, if it is possible to preserve valuable ice, “it would be a
gift of fortune, a gift from God.” (Grímsson did not reply to a request for
comment.) If we have the opportunity to preserve an irreplaceable part of
the planet’s climate system, don’t we have the responsibility to do so? And
yet spreading an artificial substance in a delicate ecosystem, even in the
name of environmentalism, is troubling to the part of us that wants nature
to remain as it was. I expected to be amazed by the glass bubbles, but when
I saw them for the first time, in Manzara’s workshop—almost weightless and
so reflective they seemed to glow—I was unsettled. What would they do to
the places they were intended to protect?

Back-yard studies cannot answer that question. Rigorous investigation and
open debate, on a both global and local scale, will be required before
anyone can deploy the material in a way that could make a real difference.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis will grow more urgent with every day that
passes—until, one day, the melting of the cryosphere makes our questions
moot. “The limiting factor in our case—and probably in most of these
research cases—is money,” Zornetzer said. “We’re moving as fast as money
will allow us to move. We know that the window is closing and that time is
running out. We’ve got maybe a decade or so before it’s too late.”

Johnson and Manzara built their “glaciers” by digging four trenches, using
a Bobcat forklift, on Manzara’s property. The bottom of each trench was
lined with plastic and had a forty-five-degree incline. They filled the
trenches with water, allowed the top to freeze, and then drained water from
the deeper edge, leaving a foot-thick sheet of sloped ice. When we
inspected the glaciers in Lake Elmo, they were still mostly covered with
snow, but ice peeked out around the edges. Thermometers above- and
belowground recorded temperatures; albedometers hung from nearby metal
poles. A weather station measured air pressure and wind. Kneeling in the
snow, Manzara discovered that a car battery that had been powering one of
several small data loggers had failed. He fetched a replacement from his
workshop.

I leaned forward to inspect the ice. One glacier was smudged with carbon
black, a powdery soot that settles on glaciers. “That’s what’s killing the
glaciers in the Himalayas,” Manzara explained. Forests go up in smoke;
humans continue to burn dirty fuels. “That makes a lot of soot, and it ends
up right on top of the ice and snow, and the sun comes out, and it just
melts.” It was the effect they were studying, but in reverse. Another
glacier was also smudged with carbon black, but had been covered with white
granules. I thought the soot-topped glacier had shrunk more than the
others, but it was too soon to tell. The real question was whether the
coated glacier would last longer.

We went back to Manzara’s kitchen table to regroup. Near a window that
overlooked the pond, the glaciers, and a bird feeder busy with cardinals
and woodpeckers, Field shared updates from the Bright Ice Initiative’s
latest meetings with partners in India. This summer, if the permissions are
finalized, the group will conduct a field test on a section of the
six-square-mile Chhota Shigri Glacier
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/investigating-chhota-shigri-glacier>,
in the Hindu Kush region of the western Himalayas. “Chhota” means “small”
in Hindi, but it is part of a network of thousands of glaciers that
represent the third-largest block of freshwater on Earth, after the polar
ice caps; hydrologists have nicknamed it the Third Pole. Unexpected melts
put downstream communities at risk of floods, and the disappearance of the
glaciers could deprive billions of people of freshwater. Soumitra Das leads
the nonprofit Healthy Climate Initiative and lived in the foothills of the
Himalayas before moving to the U.S. He is now working with Field and her
colleagues, and estimates that the total cost of a three-year field trial,
including materials, equipment, and compensation for local graduate
students to assist with monitoring, would be about two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. He told me that Himalayan glaciers are so crucial to
global sea levels, and thus to political stability, that the test has to go
forward; he called the effort to save ice “our most important work to save
humanity.”

It stayed cold in Minnesota for another two weeks. On Easter Sunday,
Manzara put on some rubber boots and walked to check on the glaciers. The
temperature had got into the sixties the day before, and had finally been
above freezing at night—the hillside’s snow had given way to spring mud. At
the test site, the snowpack had melted, revealing the ice itself. The
darkest glacier—the one covered in soot—was clearly shrinking fastest. But
the dark glacier treated with granules was melting more slowly. The
granules had stuck. The ice had a little time left. ♦

*An earlier version of this article misnamed the city of Lake Elmo,
Minnesota.*

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