The Arctic Ice Project is a Silicon Valley non-profit research organization that aims to slow

climate change Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in Global surface temperature, global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. Climate variability and change, Climate change in ...

by restoring ice in the Arctic. Their scientific research in ice preservation technologies represents an opportunity to buy up to 15 more years for the world's economies to decarbonize. The organization has built an innovation network of prestigious external scientific partnerships that include the top specialists and organizations in the climate field in order to coordinate a moonshot effort to stop Arctic ice melt in key portions of the Arctic, our planet's heat-shield.

Solution

The Arctic Ice Project's approach is to spread hollow silica microspheres (reflective sand) on top of ice in the Arctic. The microspheres raise the reflecting power of polar ice. This reduces the amount of sunlight absorbed, and slows the melting of the ice. The microspheres are bright white, and each one is 35 microns in diameter (less than the diameter of a human hair). The microspheres are filled with air and they float. The vision is to cover a strategic area of the Arctic about the size of Belgium with microspheres. Target locations will be near communities that depend on the ice, and routes through which melting ice reaches the wider ocean. The Arctic Ice Project aims to rebuild a natural system with the least possible intervention. The Arctic Ice Project's silica microspheres will dissolve over time. This is a form of “soft

geoengineering Geoengineering (also known as climate engineering or climate intervention) is the deliberate large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system intended to counteract human-caused climate change. The term commonly encompasses two broad cate ...

”. It is claimed to be less damaging and more reversible than other techniques. Some scientists are concerned about the risks of restoring Arctic ice, as this approach could have

unintended consequences In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences, more colloquially called knock-on effects) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was po ...

. The Arctic Ice Project maintains that its approach will not drastically alter the ecosystem or pollute the environment. ].

References

External links

* * {{cite journal, title=Increasing Arctic Sea Ice Albedo Using Localized Reversible Geoengineering, journal=Earth's Future, volume=6, issue=6, pages=882–901, date=May 21, 2018, doi=10.1029/2018EF000820, last1=Field, first1=L., last2=Ivanova, first2=D., last3=Bhattacharyya, first3=S., last4=Mlaker, first4=V., last5=Sholtz, first5=A., last6=Decca, first6=R., last7=Manzara, first7=A., last8=Johnson, first8=D., last9=Christodoulou, first9=E., last10=Walter, first10=P., last11=Katuri, first11=K., doi-access=free Geoengineering