In Denierland, q.v., I noted that the snow that falls on Arctic ice that has survived the summer thaw slows the rate at which it thickens. With a snuggly blanket on top, it does not get as cold as it otherwise would. Snow that falls on open water disappears, so that the new ice forming in open water thickens faster than the surviving “multi-year” ice.

At the time, it occurred to me that a seasonal story might invent a maverick scientist who, noting the “Arctic death spiral,” might turn the snow observation into a “send money now” project. This might be a project to air-lift autonomous, battery-powered snowploughs onto the ice, and send them zooming up and down to push the snow off, thereby increasing the thickening of said ice, and “tackling climate change.” No doubt the solar cells on the ploughs would keep them going throughout the long Arctic winter. (cf. the present Australian PM.)

My ruminations on this potential story were given a boost by an apparently real story about an outfit of chancers who – while not planning to deploy autonomous snow ploughs – wanted to do something substantially similar. As I remembered it, they wanted to spray seawater onto ice floes. The surface of the ice being colder than the seawater, the seawater would freeze, and the ice would thicken accordingly.

This spring, riffling through my notebooks in search of story ideas appropriate to the time of year, I came across my snow plough plotline, and decided to put it together. Here’s how it would go. I would create a fictional outfit of chancers who were adamant that their snow plough idea was not just feasible, it was practical, and an inexpensive means of staving off climate collapse.

Then, I would admit that the story was just too absurd to be remotely believable.

Then, (surprise!) I would note that actually, just such an outfit of chancers once existed, and that they begged for funds to do something equally absurd, expensive and impractical – namely spraying brine onto the ice in order to thicken it. Eventually, of course, like all such schemes, the money would soon stop flowing, and those behind it would move on to something else.

For that, I had to remind myself who they were, and what it was they had wanted to do up in the icy north. Alas, what I found was so extraordinary that it rather killed off the joke in the instant. But I’ll tell you anyway.

Readers with the memory of a pachyderm will remember that the outfit in question called themselves Climate Repair, and that they were associated with Cambridge University. They bubbled out of the green swamp in 2019 (Cliscep post by Jaime), and they were also mentioned by me in 2021. What happened next? Did they move on to doing something useful?

Well, surprisingly, they’re still about. Their website now lists several on-going projects, if we may dignify them with the term. We have marine cloud brightening (spraying water into the air from robot ships), stratospheric aerosol injection (what could go wrong?), marine curtains (stop the AMOC in its tracks with giant plastic screens anchored to the sea floor and held up by a row of buoys), and of course our old favourite, sea ice thickening. Alas for them, the Cambridge lot don’t get to go to the icy north to play with water pumps. Their experiments are done indoors. But they do now have a collaboration with a bunch called Real Ice, who have been doing real experiments in the real outdoors in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Who funds them? Who knows. They’ve gone one better than my flight of fancy though. Not only do they thicken the ice as it forms in the autumn: they then spray snow on it in the spring to stop it melting. The latest plan is to deploy 500,000 underwater drones, which will drill through the ice, pump water up onto it, retract the pipework, resubmerge, move a kilometre or two, and do the same again.

Nothing can go wrong, I tell you!

According to their Executive Chairperson,

We’re trying to seed an ice growing industry

PBS explains it all so much better than I can, in a short – some might say mercifully short – youtube video. See if you can bear to watch it to the end. I did. The code phrase if you do make it to the end is probably “Thank God.” Enjoy – if that is the correct word.