Ecology Section ----- R. Frozen Regions

We're on a moving train. We now live on a runaway planet. Beyond our own human production of greenhouse gases, we're in the beginning stages of an exponentially accelerating set of feedback loops:

1. Our polar regions now have amazingly warm summer weather. The Arctic's permafrost is thawing. If 100% of the Arctic's permafrost thaws, 1.7 trillion tons of greenhouse gases will be released into the atmosphere. Atmospheric greenhouse gas levels will nearly triple from 425 ppm. We can estimate our remaining timetable -- Yale360 estimated on 1/21/20 that 20% of the permafrost will melt by 2040. A reasonable number of research tunnels have been cut down into the permafrost in various countries, and reports are that all of them are slowly dripping melted water. Bottom line, we're all going to feel regret soon enough that we didn't stop the planetary thaw-out.

Temperate zones are also experiencing less days of snow cover, which changes the region's average annual reflective albedo from more snow white to more dark, and in a study performed in eastern Massachusetts this absence was causing a slow release of extra greenhouse gases from temperate climate soil.

2. The Western U.S. and many other areas of the planet are experiencing megadroughts. Multi-decade megadroughts are characterized by overall loss of natural vegetation on a grand scale, by runaway insect plagues, by megafires and by a massive acreage of tree deaths from unprecedented summer high temperature and low humidity events. Bare topsoil underneath billions of dead trees can quickly become bone-dry in summer. Extended periods of bone-dry soils in summer can lead to ultra-low humidity and record high temperatures. Climate researcher Christopher Haines and others are concerned that most current urban landscapes and plowed fields also exacerbate regional extreme heating events.

For further reading: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02092022/study-finds-that-mississippi-river-basin-could-be-in-an-extreme-heat-belt-in-30-years/

Beyond these two critical feedback loops are many serious climate effects. A massive extinction of species is underway. We'd be smart to put a vast number of species into extinction zoos. Our world's coasts can see 200 mph typhoons on top of sea level rise. The American Midwest is seeing town-busting wedge tornadoes. As an inventor I assume that humanity can develop hardened building codes for some of this new reality, not that we'll like it.

For further reading: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/01/03/fire-ice-the-puzzling-link-between-western-wildfires-arctic-sea-ice/?utm_campaign=The%20UnEarth%20Bulletin&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter

This ecology section of web pages is especially concerned with the following goals:
- Increasing our net natural sequestration of carbon dioxide within most of our planet's biomes
- Decreasing our ongoing massive natural release of sequestered methane and carbon dioxide
- Keeping a lid on higher than normal regional temperatures
- Inhibiting regional megadroughts and ameliorating regional flood-drought cycles

We seek net carbon sequestration, not a break-even policy. We're now on a moving train.

We seek retention of water within the topsoil and also in traditional mountain glaciers and late spring snow pack.

We seek a lowering of air temperatures. Changing solar heat into transpiration or evaporation is usually better for the regional climate than letting the sun heat the bare ground or the bare concrete.

R1. Frozen ecology

“Albedo” refers to the reflectivity of a part of the earth. A high albedo means that a high proportion of sunlight is reflected back into space. Fresh snow has a high albedo.

We're on track to have an Arctic disaster. We're now looking at spectacularly hot Arctic summers relative to perhaps 50 years ago. The most direct cause of this overheating is a reduction in the Arctic's spring and summer albedo from snow white to either blue on the Arctic Ocean or brownish on the tundra. Also, without snow the tundra is bone-dry. After millions of years of torpor, the tundra is catching fire. Tundra megafires are even surviving the Arctic winters -- they can spring back to life in spring after surviving deep under the soil all winter.

The loss of Arctic ice has been suggested as one cause for the megadrought and megafires in the western U.S. See: cleantechnica.com/2022/01/03/fire-ice-the-puzzling-link-between-western-wildfires-arctic-sea-ice/?utm_campaign=The%20UnEarth%20Bulletin&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter

All parts of the earth and the oceans are absorbing more heat these days, and then they're losing heat more slowly at night. Nowhere is regional heat absorption more dramatic than in cold regions that once were white and ice-covered, or that used to be covered with snow for a greater portion of the year. The Arctic Ocean and the tundra have become relatively ice-free and hot these days. Temperature changes in nearby boreal, frost belt and mountainous regions aren't as dramatic but we should still be honest about heat absorption - we're going to miss the snow cover. We face the numbers or we all suffer. When suffering goes around it tends to come all the way around.

For further reading: Across the Boreal Forest, Scientists Are Tracking Warming’s Toll. Researchers are studying dramatic changes in the vast northern forests: thawing permafrost, drowned trees, methane releases, increased wildfires, and the slow transformation from carbon sinks to carbon emitters.

Human civilization must plan and engineer for this reality or else we will continue to see worse results. In my opinion, almost zero worldwide R&D effort is being productively put into avoiding a disastrous end. Planners probably aren't thinking at all about the permafrost release alternatives described on this web page. Either the lot of us have chosen a path of much suffering, hunger and death by default or else at least a few of us have chosen to pursue potent R&D paths.

A city has its fire department put out a forest fire before it burns down the city. Waiting until 20% of the city is afire doesn't make sense. A wise coalition of nations will inhibit the Arctic thaw-out well before the catastrophe picks up momentum.

R2. Flaring Arctic methane

Methane has been estimated to be 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide on a 20 year time scale, and we're in the middle of positive climate feedback loops. Compact wind-powered sparking devices with small batteries could be inexpensively flaring off known Arctic point source methane releases, turning methane into carbon dioxide. This solution is affordable and it can be quickly implemented. We would want to worry about sparking tundra fires, but many methane releases are from lakes.

We need a spark. A relatively small photocell will work for 8 months of the year in the Arctic. The sparker wouldn't be able to flare in November but it would work for most of the year. A wind-powered alternative would be a little computer fan blade to catch wind energy for sparking. Naturally, the system needs a battery for dark periods.

Millions of these flaring devices would have to be installed in muck and in tiny ponds. I visualize drone delivery or midwinter delivery because wading through deep muck is problematic. We also need methane-detecting cameras on the radio-controlled drones.

We want lightweight devices. I recommend devices with sponges that absorb and keep great amounts of local pond water to hold them in place in extreme winds, and with floats.

For ponds, the system needs a tiny anchor that drops into the muck at the bottom of the pond. Certain precise spots are yielding much of the methane.

It's best if the system captures and concentrates methane bubbling up through a pond's surface or through muck. I visualize a collection bag in the middle of a flexible hoop of sponges. The collection bag can lay on the pond's surface – the methane will still make its way to the collection bag's pipe.

The pipe has a well-insulated throat. Methane won't burn below the pipe's throat, but the metal throat stays hot from burning methane so that flaring is constant even when sparking doesn't take place.

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R3. Enhancing winter sea ice formation with seawater pumps

A floating ice enhancing pump, wind-powered, raises seawater above the surface of the Arctic Ocean's winter ice pack. In the Arctic winter, anywhere below 22 degrees F, freshwater ice crystals will form in the water. The salt brine remaining from the freezing process will almost certainly make its way back down into the ocean through salt-maintained holes or through new cracks created in the winter ice pack.

Restoring the Arctic Ocean's original ice pack albedo causes spring and summer sunlight to be reflected back into space, as was always true before the climate crisis started. Right now the sun penetrates deep into the Arctic Ocean and warms methane clathrates sitting on the Arctic Ocean's continental shelves, or else blue Arctic Ocean water adds water vapor to the Arctic atmosphere in summer.

The Arctic is a harsh environment for refueling any device. Fortunately, 100 knot winds aren't completely uncommon in the Arctic, so local wind power is readily available all year at intermittent times.

My albedo-restoring plans are pretty much ecologically benign. For example, my pump apparently doesn't disturb the naturally rather anaerobic under-ice ecology in the Arctic Ocean.

This sketch shows the ice block only as a 100 foot deep ice cube. The rest of the ice block stretches out half a mile in all directions. The drawing emphasizes my device's ability to ground the new ice block onto shallow ocean bottoms, and its ability to stay above the ice as it continually lays down new layers of ice.

The cone-shaped floats are designed to pop loose from the ice as more feet of new ice are built on top and as the iceberg sinks into the ocean. 90% of any iceberg stays underwater. Heating wires dangle so that the floats are actually floating on water, and can pop up. A heating wire in the center also allows seawater to flow up to the bottom of the pump's pipe.

Perhaps one million such devices will cause the entire Arctic Ocean to freeze 15 feet thick, reversing the Arctic Ocean’s melting, and preventing a runaway global methane release. The cost to the world of ameliorating the worst of polar warming would be about $1B/year until we bring atmospheric greenhouse gases back to around 300 ppm.

Environmental impacts are low. In particular, this device does not disturb the typical low-oxygen marine environment under the polar pack ice.

I first suggested this floating pump device on Internet comment forums many years ago. Arizona State University students and faculty should get some credit for taking the first steps to design such a device.

Our market economy has no open market system for perfecting and ramping up such a device. A coalition of industrialized nations would first have to see the device functioning, and then they might fund its deployment.

R4. Re-anchoring the Thwaite glacier onto the seabed

This satellite image of Antarctica shows which parts of the "continent" are actually below sea level once the ice sheet melts, and also if sea level doesn't rise 60 meters from the ice sheet melting into water. Right now relatively warm seawater is undercutting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, that seabed area roughly below the Antarctic Peninsula mountain range in the satellite image..

Ice isn't exactly as strong as steel. An ice cliff anywhere in the range of half a mile high is expected to deform under its own weight and crumble. As such, scientists are wondering if the Antarctic Thwaite glacier, part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, will crumble into the ocean even within perhaps a decade or perhaps in a century. FEMA cares about once a decade flooding and once in 1000 year floods, so the odds of flooding of every coastal city within a decade or a century should properly concern them. We're already seeing deformation of the front tens of kilometers of the Thwaite glacier into enormous tilted ice blocks.The world's oceans would rise perhaps two feet, with the understanding that scientists don't have confidence in the amount of sea level rise.

A baseline rise of two feet means that every coastal city's storm surges will start two feet higher, and so we could see not a few subway systems flooded out with notably corrosive salt water.

If even a few ice enhancing devices, above, were positioned in front of Antarctica's Thwaite glacier in Pine Island Bay, they could grow floating ice downward several hundred feet until the ice became well-anchored on the bay's bottom. This would once again protect the Thwaite glacier from crumbling into the sea. Other glaciers in Northern Greenland and in Antarctica could also be anchored.

R5. A coastal plain seawater pump

It's equally possible to pump seawater through an insulated and somewhat heated pipe onto a coastal plain or onto an ice sheet. This procedure would create a new glacier. It would change the coastal plain's albedo to white all summer. Humanity would be sacrificing a small portion of the Arctic to preserve the rest of the Arctic and to protect the rest of the world from a runaway greenhouse gas release.

Making new glaciers wouldn't significantly lower the ocean's level unless performed on a massive scale. The top one meter of ocean times 360 million square km (40 million square miles) of ocean equals 360 thousand cubic kilometers (86,000 cubic miles) of water. That would make a pretty big new glacier. It's theoretically possible to pump vast amounts of seawater quite a distance up onto Greenland's ice sheet in cold seasons using wind power, allowing the residual salt brine to run back down to the sea. It might be more cost-effective to use wind/sun to pump seawater up small coastal mountains in frozen seasons, filling mountaintops, smaller valleys and fjords with ice. At least this scheme would change the local terrain's surface albedo to ice-white.

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R6. Enhancing permafrost refreezing with air pipes

A simple non-moving air pipe, possibly a ceramic half-pipe, sits on a section of tundra. Strong prevailing Arctic winds send air into the pipe's expanded inlet cowlings and through the pipes. Normally the new windblown snowfalls insulate the ground in winter, but the pipes put a flow of extremely cold air directly in contact with the ground. If the ground beneath the pipes has been frozen into a ridged shape, heat transfer between the air and the ground will be facilitated.

The cowlings are designed so that snowfall never completely clogs either end of the air pipe. The pipe is white to reflect a bit of summer sunlight back into space. In summer the tundra would normally be absorbing heat, so a bit of airflow through the pipe isn't that much of a problem.

The cowlings will have some minimal cost as they need to stick up above winter snow depths every single winter. Pipes will be as low-cost as possible. The design below shows many small air pipes all passing winter air from one cowling to the other cowling. The diamond formations fit together to cool a wide area.

Once the pipes are in place, the local permafrost will hopefully get farther below freezing every year, in which case the pipes won't sink into the tundra's muck. A more frozen tundra will keep white snowfall on the ground farther into the summer, reflecting sunlight back into space, which is normal for the Arctic.

Deployment should probably be before the top inch of the muck has frozen over. for the year. This allows the ridging of the muck for top thermal transfer. If the mud stays frozen in this advantageous thermal transfer position for decades, so much the better.

I have about a 90 degree arc of pipe in order to have a good width of winter air to tundra contact, with wide footings on both ends of the 90 degree arc for stability in the mud. More winter air to earth contact makes for better heat transfer out of the tundra in winter. I don't worry at all about possible air leaks under the sides of the 1/4 pipe.

I can see a minor disturbance of caribou grazing habits from the cooling pipes, but nothing major. If a pipe section is flipped over by a curious polar bear, someone can flip it back into place. The air pipes can be a bit leaky and they'll still perform well.

For a more natural tundra look, the air pipes could be buried under a few inches of Arctic tundra muck.

R7. Artificial snowmaking for the climate

A small wind-powered artificial snow making unit sits on the tundra and coats a few acres with blowing snowflakes in late spring and in early fall, changing the tundra's albedo (solar reflectivity) back to its traditional white.

A Russian scientist who has dubbed himself "The Prophet of Permafrost" claims that snow insulates the permafrost in winter, keeping the Arctic's winter cold from cooling the permafrost. For this reason I recommend not coating the tundra with snow in fall or in winter, but waiting until the last few useful months for snow, during the spring thawing out season to heavily coat the nearby tundra with snow. During the spring and summer thawing season, an enhanced layer of snow insulates the permafrost from record summer heat farther into the summer.

Arctic winds can be fierce. If it's possible to produce extremely tiny snowflakes that carry in the wind, and if it's possible to release these snowflakes at the top of a tower, one snowmaking machine might coat a considerable acreage of tundra. An air pump might be able to send the snowflakes up a tube to the top. Alternatively, air-pumping tiny snowflakes up the slope of a mountain might work.

Artificial snow-making devices might improve the albedo of the soot-covered Greenland ice sheet. Once the soot is covered up with fresh snow, it loses its ability to capture solar heat.

R8. Half of the planet might need more snow

An experiment in Massachusetts showed that a snow-covered winter allows the soil to sequester more carbon than a snowless winter. For climate change reasons, perhaps we should be pumping tiny artificial snowflakes into state and provincial forests from Labrador all the way down to the Carolinas.

I've heard that when ruminants such as caribou trample down the snow with their hooves, the resultant ice and near-ice lasts longer into the summer.

Plant-based carbon sequestration into the tundra (and elsewhere) is reportedly maximized when ruminants graze on a field once per year. Various grasses send down deep roots, and when the grasses are bitten off close to the soil, their root systems die back. This leaves their dead cellulose roots still deep in the soil, where the carbon can stay sequestered for a much longer period of time. Active reindeer herding to maximize carbon sequestration and to tamp down the snow might be a better-than-nothing climate change tool.

R9. Mountain glacier and ice sheet runoff recycling pumps

Mountain glaciers and Arctic glaciers are disappearing. Most regions especially need their mountain glaciers in late summer for fresh water stream melt. Glaciers and snow fields also have a white albedo that naturally reflects sunlight back into space in the spring and summer.

The goal here is to restore the mountain glacier's white surface albedo and provide a flow of late summer water downstream despite the ravages of climate change. At certain times in shoulder months, meltwater will still be flowing in a stream underneath a mountain glacier's bottom, and at the same time the outside temperature is below freezing. It's possible to find a geologist who can pinpoint the stream bottom beneath the center of a mountain glacier. Drill through the ice to the stream. Use a windmill to pump the water onto the top of the mountain glacier at the right times.

If the air temperature is only a few degrees below freezing, spray a fine mist of the water back above the top of the glacier. The water will freeze in the air and then the small flakes might blow some distance downwind from the pump. Given an extremely cold temperature, just pump the water onto the surface of the mountain glacier where it will almost all freeze. This water to ice recycling process won't work on hotter summer days, nor is there any liquid water to pump in midwinter, but it should work better than nothing and it should be cost-efficient.

As the water pump grows the glacier from the top up, meter by meter with newly manufactured ice and snow, the pump must somehow raise itself several meters to avoid having the new snow, the new ice and the new pools of freezing water slowly swallow and bury the pump someday. The pump might be able to float on rising pontoons similar to my floating seawater pump for enhancing winter ice formation, assuming that all drainage holes around the pontoons tend to freeze over so that the pump can float itself upwards on the mountain glacier within tiny water puddles surrounding each of the floats. Tiny electric heaters might help with creating water puddles around the floats for the floating upwards process.

Note that fresh white artificial snow-making devices will improve the summer albedo of the soot-covered Greenland ice sheet, reducing the Arctic's general temperature. We might also use wind power to pump much of Greenland's fresh water outflow back up to the surface of the ice sheet where on most days and nights it will re-freeze. The existence of a few days where the top of Greenland's ice sheet has gone above freezing doesn't negate the good that can be done on most days.

The science fiction writer Kim Stanley Gardner heard from an engineer that a water pump of similar design might prevent ice rivers from suddenly accelerating into the ocean. This hard SF invention was published in his novel, “The Ministry for the Future.” A certain ice river in Greenland once slid 3 miles in 90 minutes as researchers watched. However, this might possibly have been a localized Greenland phenomenon requiring an ice river backed by a wide ice sheet where water can pool.

R10. Another glacier repumping design

A second solution for repumping a slowly moving glacier is to cut a small tunnel into the solid rock hillside from the current fresh water stream at the bottom of the glacier up toward the ridge line. Put a water pipe into the tunnel. Run a pump of some sort down this water pipe. Cover the top of this tunnel with concrete so that the restored glacier slides past the recessed tunnel, at glacial speeds of course. To minimize tunnel costs, find a place where the stream runs past the steepest possible slope running up a ridge to the left or to the right of the glacier. It might be worthwhile to pump the water further uphill along the ridgeline, in an insulated pipe, with auxiliary heating of the melted water provided by wind power so that the pipe doesn't freeze. Put a wind turbine on a ridge overlooking the middle of the glacier.

On warm days it's possible to pump meltwater out of the glacier's bottom and store the water far uphill in a pond, then let the water drip out at night so that it all freezes.

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Plant-based carbon sequestration into the tundra (and elsewhere) is reportedly maximized when ruminants graze on a field once per year. Various grasses send down deep roots, and when the grasses are bitten off close to the soil, their root systems die back. This leaves their dead cellulose roots still deep in the soil, where the carbon can stay sequestered for a much longer period of time. Active reindeer herding to maximize carbon sequestration and to tamp down the snow might be a better-than-nothing climate change tool.

R11. Adding extra snowflakes in early spring, and possibly down to the Frost Belt

We'll want to be managing much of the Earth's land surface to achieve better net carbon sequestration. A Harvard study found that in winter, a snow-covered patch of forest in Massachusetts released less soil carbon than did an equivalent snow-free patch of forest. At the very least, spring snow pack is known as farmers' gold and a layer of snow reflects sunlight back into space. Perhaps the world needs more renewable energy powered snowmaking equipment.