• ItsPequod [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    Fuckin…

    Dare I suggest the problem isn’t a lack of water so much as the temperature of said water. And that took like, 5 seconds of thought.

    • Hello_Kitty_enjoyer [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      below ice is a lot warmer than above ice, so theoretically this helps in one dimension of the problem, which is probably the angle they’re going for

      practically it’s still stupid because it’s about as effective as moving a semi truck with a sewing needle

      it’s even stupider theoretically because the salt is gonna lower the melting point of the already-there ice, which likely has some freshwater snow precipitation on it

    • pancake@lemmygrad.ml
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      6 days ago

      Ice isolates water from the cold air above though. And simply freezing lots of water makes the surface more reflective too, which mitigates further heating.

    • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      So as others have mentioned, the water underneath the ice is warmer than the air above it. That’s a problem, because then the glacial sheets melt from the bottom up. If you pump enough water out from under the ice, not only will it refreeze in the much colder air above, it will eventually cause the glacier to sink until it makes contact with the ground again. That would remarkably slow the speed at which it melts, and thus help retain more ice longer which would prevent sea level rise and keep the reflective surface and reduce warming.

      This sounds dumb, but the science is pretty cool. It would require a metric fuckton of pump capacity, though. This is likely a small proof of concept test to secure future funding.

  • TheDrink [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    This page cites some studies that have already been done into this idea, and the prognosis is not good. Even if we embarked on the absolutely massive undertaking of building the pumps, desalination facilities, and wind turbines necessary to do this at scale, and committed to the massive cost of maintaining all of those machines in the harsh environments of the arctic/antarctic, the effect would only be preventing a small amount of sea level rise in the short term.

    So yea sinking some cruise ships seems to be the best option.

  • FnordPrefect [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    eco-porky Our hypothesis is that, since nothing else could be changing ice levels, the water must simply be too lazy to turn into ice. So, as managers, our role is to make up irrelevant procedures to motivate/force the water to do what we want regardless of any concern from other disciplines like “ethics” or “physics”.

  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    Freezing the water only moves the heat into the atmosphere. Not that it had to be explained.

    There was one interesting thing I read about a few years ago, a heat pump that is able to absorb heat energy and radiate it into space at a frequency that the atmosphere is especially transparent.

  • dat_math [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    Did any of the literature describe the energy balance (or at least the expenditure side) of this intervention?

    How would scaling this kind of process impact arctic wilderness conservation projects that should be as isolated from human activity as possible?