Building Thicker Sea Ice
It has been proposed to actively enhance the polar ice cap by spraying or pumping water onto the top of it which would build thicker sea ice. As ice is an insulator, water on the surface of the ice tends to freeze more quickly than that below. River water could be used for this purpose, as salt water tends to resist freezing, and may end up perforating the resulting ice sheet.
Thickening ice by spraying seawater onto existing ice has been proposed. Sea ice is an effective thermal insulator, and thus freezing takes place much more rapidly on the top surface of the ice sheet than on the bottom. Thicker sea ice is more structurally stable, and is more resistant to melting due to its increased mass. An additional benefit of this method is that the increased salt content of the melting ice will tend to strengthen downwelling currents when the ice re-melts.
Read more about this topic: Arctic Geoengineering
Famous quotes containing the words building, thicker, sea and/or ice:
“A publisher is a specialised form of bank or building society, catering for customers who cannot cope with life and are therefore forced to write about it.”
—Colin Haycraft (b. 1929)
“A hair plucked from a rich man is thicker than a poor man’s waist.”
—Chinese proverb.
“If I were as I once was, the strong hoofs crushing the sand and the shells,
Coming out of the sea as the dawn comes, a chaunt of love on my lips,
Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the bells,
I would leave no saint’s head on his body from Rachlin to Bera of ships.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)