Could geoengineering ‘ice arches’ help preserve Arctic sea ice?
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- Arctic Reflections, a Netherlands-based startup, received a £9.9 million UK government grant to investigate whether its ice-thickening technique could strengthen ice arches in the Nares Strait between Greenland and Ellesmere Island.
- The idea originated with Malcolm Davidson of the European Space Agency, who observed in 2011 that natural ice arches block the strait and conceived of supporting them to preserve Arctic sea ice and boost Earth's albedo.
- Ice arches haven't been lasting as long in recent decades — failing to form entirely in three of the past 20 years — allowing an estimated 95,000 square kilometers of ice to flush through the strait annually.
- In a 2024 Svalbard field trial, Arctic Reflections thickened sea ice from 90 to 116 centimeters by flooding snow with pumped seawater, though it's unclear whether artificially thickened ice lasts longer through summer.
- Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking by almost 80,000 square kilometers per year on average and could disappear in summertime as soon as the 2030s, according to the article.
- Kent Moore at the University of Toronto argues the bulk of ice loss occurs in years when arches don't form at all: 'if the arches aren't forming, then there's nothing to thicken, so you're losing the ice anyway.'
- Sergei Kirillov at the University of Manitoba says retained ice would 'simply melt in place during the summer due to the warmer climate' regardless, while Mark Serreze at the University of Colorado Boulder calls the approach a 'band-aid.'
Why it matters: Thickening tens of square kilometers of ice at the Nares Strait could keep tens of thousands of square kilometers from melting each summer — an enormous leverage point — but only in years when arches actually form, which is happening less reliably as the Arctic warms. Critics say energy directed at geoengineering band-aids would be better spent cutting emissions directly.
