The Arctic may be ice-free in summer within twenty years. That's bad news for all of us, not just for polar bears. Here's why:Sometimes referred to as the Earth's air-conditioner, the Arctic Sea plays a vital role in the world's climate. As Arctic ice melts in summer, it exposes the darker-colored ocean water, which absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it, accelerating the effect of global warming.(Emphasis added.) We can fix the problem if we stop belching filth into the atmosphere. But that won't happen for a while -- probably not for decades.
Dr Martin Sommerkorn, from the environmental charity WWF's Arctic program, which worked on the survey, said the predicted loss of ice could have wide-reaching affects around the world.
"The Arctic Sea ice holds a central position in our Earth's climate system. Take it out of the equation and we are left with a dramatically warmer world," he said.
"This could lead to flooding affecting one-quarter of the world's population, substantial increases in greenhouse gas emissions .... and extreme global weather changes."
I've come up with a possible "temp fix" which could be put into action within the next year or two. Obviously, I'm no scientist: I am publicizing this idea in order to stimulate discussion. The idea comes down to one word:
Pykrete.
During World War II, an eccentric British boffin named Geoffrey Pyke proposed making super-massive, nearly unsinkable aircraft carriers out of pykrete, which is, in essence, ice fortified with a smallish percentage of wood pulp. Pykrete melts very slowly and is extremely resistant to munitions. Although Churchill was intrigued (or so legend has it), the proposed ships were never put into production.
Ever since, the idea of pykrete has tickled the fancy of everyone possessing both a romantic streak and a scientific streak. In recent times, a number of people have taken a second look at the substance -- including the Mythbusters crew, who put it to the test.
They found that pykrete really is extraordinarily durable, and far more bullet-resistant than is untreated ice. They tested a pykrete boat, which melted. (The boat was not built with the refrigeration units suggested by Pyke.) An aircraft carrier made of the stuff is probably not a good idea. Nevertheless, we should take a closer look at their experiment:
The third test involved determining how long small-scale boats made of each material (ice, pykrete, pseudo-pykrete) would maintain its integrity in warm water before total failure due to melting. The ice boat failed in approximately 1 minute; the pykrete failed after 5 minutes; while the pseudo-pykrete maintained its integrity for almost 60 minutes.What the Mythbusters call "pseudo-pykrete" is a simple substitution of newspaper strips for wood pulp. The stuff's not difficult to make -- DIY-ers may want to visit this site.
The Mythbusters team scoffed the idea of pykrete boats. But who cares about ship-building? I'm more interested in the finding that pykrete proved 60 times more resistant to melting when compared to normal ice.
All of which leads me to offer this modest proposal: During the ice-formation season in the Arctic, why not drop tons of shredded newsprint/paper/wood pulp over the area?
As I understand it, the pykrete -- or "pseudo-pykrete" -- should make itself. The resultant ice cover should last longer, resulting in more blockage of that dreaded dark water -- which should, in turn, result in reduced global warming.
Even if the trick does not work, there should be no great environmental harm, since wood pulp and newsprint are biodegradable. Right now, tons of the stuff go into landfills all over the world, year after year. Why not use it to carpet the Arctic? I think that every home and office in America would happily donate their used paper to this project.
Is there an intractable problem which would render this modest proposal unworkable? Perhaps. That's why I'm asking the readers to tell me where I'm wrong.
Widen the discussion -- spread the word about this post.
18 comments:
I don't see any blatant, intractable problems with your idea, but I'm no scientist. I would think that not only would this slow the melting, but could re-establish the lost arctic ice that's melted - if it melts more slowly during the summer, there'll be more ice to build upon come winter. Maybe the risk is... too much arctic ice? Oh, no!
I say, good idea, worth investigating.
So simple, so practical, so elegant!
And from now on I'm lacing my cooler packs with shredded newsprint.
That is a really interesting idea. Rebuild the ice shelves using shredded newspaper. I don't think it would work but on the surface this seems to have several benefits. If it worked it could reduce the melting ice caps while simultaneously creating a sink for all of this extra carbon we've generated for decades. Thing is, organic compounds such as newspaper are broken down by microbes which produce greenhouse gases such as methane. Think of termites as an example.
Termites can't actually digest the cellulose contained wood. It is the bacteria that live in their gut tract that do the job for them in a symbiotic relationship.
But of course this is probably to good to be true. The hidden effects of this have to be explored. What would be the repercussions of dropping that much organic matter into the arctic ecosystem?
Would bacteria that eat organic matter explode and generate more greenhouse gases and actually speed up global warming? Would moss and lichens explode in the area? How would this affect the wildlife populations? How would this affect the climate? All very good avenues for a discussion. If you don't mind I think I'll look up some details and maybe contact some people who are experts in this sort of thing.
It makes too much sense - therefore it will never work.
Well, there are chemicals in newsprint and in many wood products, and I wonder about putting those in the water. Couldn't they then travel even more freely across the globe?
This guy takes the idea a few steps further...
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Great_20Pykrete_20Pyramid_20of_20Ellesmere
His idea for a "Autophagic Heavy-Pykrete Starship" makes for entertaining reading, too.
I googled this a little, expecting to find some discussion of the idea and maybe a reasonable-sounding argument against it, but I came up with surprisingly little.
Figure out a way for Big Oil and Big Insurance to cash in on the idea and it will happen by Christmas next.
Also, that idea is no nutter than the idea I had years ago about somehow cooling the Gulf waters in front of a hurricane. I didn't have the mechanism in mind, though I understand others have come up with plans to try something along those lines.
So don't sell yourself short-- this might well be the magic bullet for the Arctic ice pack.
It sounds interesting. I saw a show on why the ice is melting so fast and it seems to be in part due to the way the melted water pools and then cuts into the ice underneath. A cascade effect, that grows. Maybe this would slow it down by slowing the flow of water.
Well, does this stuff require fabrication/manufacture, or would simply dropping cellulose fiber-rich newspaper create it automatically?
Then there's the problem with smaller and smaller newspapers, of the ones that haven't ceased publication in print entirely (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, anybody?).
Those still extant may rely upon recycled newspaper for cheaper production costs. Should an additional large demand be created for this project, the cost of recycled newspaper might skyrocket, and put more newspapers on the brink of bankruptcy.
On second thought, full speed ahead, then!
XI
Not a joke, huh? Really?
Okay, just the obvious problems that come to mind.
1. The icecap volume. 50,000 square kilometers (aprox. area) X 4 or 5 meters (guess of avg. thinkness in Winter). And that is just the sea ice. It doesn't include all of the surrounding ice sheets, much of which drains into the Arctic Ocean. I don't know how much newsprint is produced annually, worldwide, but I'm guessing it ain't enough. Pykrete is 14% pulp. That's a lot of paper or pulp.
2. Collection and distribution. The required energy to collect and then distribute the worldwide supply of newsprint to the Arctic Cap will produce more
heat, cumulatively, then the best projected results of this project could possibly deliver.
3. The making of Pykrete is an orderly process involving molds and mixing or arrangement of pulp. In the same way that you can't make adobe by just throwing grass on mud, you can't make Pykrete by spraying pulp over the Arctic ocean.
4. The average temperature of the paper or pulp, when introduced on that scale, will have a warming effect of its own, making it that much more difficult for sea ice to form.
5 The nearly random introduction of that large of a biomass to a single spot on the planet will produce unintended far-ranging bio-chemical consequences that could possibly be catastrophic.
Thanks for your comments, Tiro. Glad to have the feedback.
1. Since the object of this operation is to maintain a cover over dark water, you would not need a thick layer. Some recipes for pykrete go as low as 4% wood pulp -- and the newsprint-made stuff is stronger than the wood pulp variety.
According to Wikipedia, there are 37 million metric tons of newsprint produced each year. To that amount may be added a whole bunch of office paper. I don't know how much of an area you could cover with that amount, but I think it would be pretty sizable.
How large an area could you cover with, say, just one metric ton (1000 kilgrams)? We're talking about a fairly thin carpet of the stuff, dispersed irregularly. We don't need to be too anal about making all of the pykrete evenly, since it isn't going to be put to industrial use or anything like that.
Almost needless to say, you would test the feasibility of the idea over a small area first.
2. The question is, how much energy would this recycling project take expressed as a percentage of the world's total energy output? I suspect it would be a fraction of one percent. So you wouldn't be adding that much to the overall global warming problem.
I never said that this is an energy conservation measure. It's a plan to keep the ice from melting. A temp fix, as I said.
The permanent fix would be to revamp how we produce and use energy. But realistically speaking, that permanent fix will not be in place for decades. The technological hurdles are high and the political hurdles are higher. Frankly, they seem insurmountable right now.
The Arctic ice will melt before that permanent fix is in place.
Yes, what I have proposed is a band-aid. If you're bleeding, a bandage is necessary.
3. People have made pykrete simply by sprinkling wood pulp into ice cube trays. Pyke himself proposed making the stuff "on the fly" to repair damage done to ships.
So how do you KNOW it can't be done out in the open? The only way to be sure is to conduct a test. Winter time is approaching. I don't live in an area where water ices over, so I cannot conduct the experiment. Perhaps you can.
4. If that were true, then pykrete would form much more slowly than ice does. I've seen no data or even anecdotal evidence to back up that suggestion.
5. Again, you don't know that. The way to be certain is to conduct a test in a limited area.
A joke: Drya, a monkey, hanging out on the Isle of Scandinavia in the late Eemian, notices his beachfront property is getting bigger. Wonders where the water is going? "Don't worry about it," a second monkey says, "124,000 years from now there's be a Little Ice Age, Young Dryas, ip's swichian..."
Ha ha ha ha ...then they go off to eat bananas and fuck.
But seriously, folks, like I told my Aunts Fran and Ollie, Gorge Kukla seems to be the only one on the money (unless you happen to look at the GRACE satellites. Then you will understand the er, gravity, of the situation). Bottom line, don't worry about the ice, we'll have lots more of that...
When I first heard that we would lose reflection of sunlight as the ice caps melted, I wondered why we couldn't lay out big sheets of reflective material.
But I read that Energy Secretary Chu has proposed painting roofs with a paint that contains reflective material.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/13/AR2009061300866.html
The article above points out that it wouldn't be as efficient for the owners of the buildings in the winter, when it's better for their energy costs not to reflect the sun's rays. But as solar cells become more efficient and cheaper, more homes and buildings will have them on top, collecting the energy and turning it into electricity to heat and cool the building.
And why just roofs? Why not streets and parking lots?
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
my only question is why Pynchon has yet to include a pykete aircraft carrier in one of his novels...
Slowly freezing ice in a continuously mixed water bath will not freeze a very large percentage of the solids in the water. So to even get even 5% loading would be difficult without heavily saturating the water first.
But even if this were to work the amounts needed would be incredible. To do this with the entire arctic ocean even if it did work would @ 5% loading would take 3.8 trillion pounds of wood pulp. Which is about the equivalent of cutting down a forest of 50 million square kilometers. That is more than 3 times the size of the arctic.
So to be realistic lets say you want to really make this work you'd have to really overload it to lets say 15% to get 5% after freezing. To make 1 square mile to test you'd need to cut down a forest (with a 1 ton tree every 25 feet apart) of 10 square miles.
Yes obviously you would just use whatever scrap paper products you could obtain but still the point is it would take way to much.
Now what you might could do is design a way to strategically place structures of pykrete in specific geometric patterns to hinder the melting of the arctic ice without using such unrealistically large amounts of wood fiber.
And btw you are trying to conserve energy. If you have to pump lots of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to do this then the work of creating this ice could still have an overall warming effect on the earth.
I think a ring around the outside to stop the ice pans from drifting appart as quickly in the spring would be enough to make a difference. There are mountains of sawdust around the mills of the world that could be mixed with waste paper and I would consider adding leaves collected in the fall. Delivery by rail to sailing ships (in the absence of airships) would minimise the carbon footprint. By the time the matterial got to the region its ambient temperature would be that of the environment and not inhibit freezup.
Well I dont know if that would work or not, but placing a giant white blanket over the ocean would work just as fine as ice, but be much easier to deploy. The area would then become colder due to the high reflexion of White. You dont need ice to cool the area, the north and south would be cool as long as there would be large mirrors or white areas around. The ice is just a biproduct of the cold and would also come after the blanket/mirrors are deployed
There are thousands of square miles of dead pine or confiferous trees in Canada. I have a plan to build multi rotor helicopter spinning within geodesic (Buckminster Fuller) spheres. These could tote the ground up dead trees to the arctic ocean. Putin and Trump could cooperate in sending their atomic powered vessels to the arctic ocean to spray water laced with the ground up trees to create pycrete and reflect the arctic sunlight. The spraying, if done during the arctic night, would also lift the planet's heat into outer space.
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