Renaud and list:
Thanks for this short squib, presumably from a New Yorker site I
couldn’t find.
Dr. Seitz was a regular on this list (maybe a predecessor list - around
2010). Googling shows him today associated with a small DC firm supplying
micro-bubble equipment.
It would be great if a list member who knows him could encourage him to
give a little more of his and others current activities on this bubble and
reflectivity topic.
Ron
> On Jun 17, 2023, at 4:34 AM, Renaud de RICHTER <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> Comment
> <image.png>
>
>
> <https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-control-of-nature/a-heat-shield-for-the-most-important-ice-on-earth>
>
> www.newyorker.com
> /news/the-control-of-nature/a-heat-shield-for-the-most-important-ice-on-earth
> <https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-control-of-nature/a-heat-shield-for-the-most-important-ice-on-earth>
>
> <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.
>
>
> 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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