The Ministry for the Future

22

Adele Elia and Bob Wharton were at a meeting of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, an international scientific organization formed to coordinate Antarctic research after the 1956 International Geophysical Year and the 1959 signing of the Antarctic Treaty. Over the years SCAR had become one of the main de facto governments of Antarctica, along with the US National Science Foundation and the British and other national Antarctic research programs, especially Argentina’s and Chile’s. The SCAR meeting was in Geneva this year, so it had been a morning’s train ride for Adele and Bob, who during their work in the ministry had become friends.

Now they sat looking out at the lake from a bar on the second story of the meeting’s hotel. Out the window beside their table they could see the famous fountain launch its spire of water into the air. To the south a stupendous set of thunderheads, as solid as the marble tabletops in their bar, lofted high over the Mont Blanc massif. They were enjoying this view and their drinks when they were approached by an American glaciologist they knew named Pete Griffen. Griffen was pulling by the arm another man they didn’t know, whom Pete introduced as Slawek, another glaciologist. Adele and Slawek had read some of each other’s papers, and even attended some of the same meetings of the AGU, but until now had never met.

A waiter appeared with a tray of drinks that Griffen had ordered: four snifters of Drambuie, and a carafe of water with water glasses. “Ah, Drambers,” Adele said with a little Gallic smile. This liqueur was what Kiwis always drank in the Dry Valleys, they informed Bob as they took their first sips. When Bob made a face as he tasted it, Griffen explained that long ago a ship filled with cases of the weird sweet stuff had been stranded in Lyttelton when its shipping company went bankrupt, and the cases had been warehoused there and over the years sent south for cheap, year after year. So they drank a toast to the Dry Valleys and settled into their chairs.

When asked, Slawek said he had spent five years all told in the Dry Valleys, and Adele countered that she had spent eight years living on glaciers; Pete grinned and topped them both with twelve years total on the Ice. They quickly pointed out that he was older and so had an advantage, which he agreed to immediately. Slawek said he had become a glaciologist to indulge his introverted personality while still holding down a job, and Adele laughed and nodded.

“A lot of us are that way,” she said.

“Not me!” Pete declared. “I like to party, but really the best parties are on the Ice.” He rotated his hand at Slawek as if coaxing him. “Come on, Slawek, tell these guys your idea. I think they need to hear it.”

Slawek frowned uncomfortably, but said, “You all heard the new data in there today.”

They agreed they had.

“Sea level will rise so fast, the world is fucked.”

It couldn’t be denied, the others agreed. The data were clear.

“So,” Pete prompted Slawek, “I’ve heard some people suggesting we just pump all the melted ice back up onto the polar plateau, right?”

Bob shook his head at hearing this. It was an old idea, he said, studied by the Potsdam Institute at one point, and the conclusions of their study had been bleak; the amount of electrical power needed to pump that much water up onto the east Antarctic ice cap came to about seven percent of all the electricity generated by all of global civilization. “It’s too energy intensive,” Bob concluded.

Slawek snorted. “Energy is the least of it. Since one percent of all electricity created is burned to make bitcoins, seven percent for saving sea level could be seen as a deal. But the physical problems are the stoppers. Have you run the numbers?”

“No?”

“Say sea level goes up one centimeter. That’s three thousand six hundred cubic kilometers of water.”

Adele and Bob glanced at each other, startled. Griffen was just smiling.

Slawek saw their look and nodded. “Right. It’s six hundred times as much as all the oil pumped every year. Building the infrastructure to do that would not be feasible. And it would have to be clean energy pumping it, or you’d be emitting more carbon. That much clean energy would take ten million windmills, Potsdam said. And the water would have to be moved in pipes, and that’s more pipe than has ever been made. And last but worst, the water has to freeze when it gets up there. Say a meter deep per year, I don’t think you could go any deeper without problems—that means about half of eastern Antarctica.”

“So it’s too much in every way,” Adele noted.

They drank more Drambers while they pondered it. Griffen said, “Come on, Slawek, get to your idea. Tell them.”

Slawek nodded. “Reality of problem is that glaciers are sliding into the sea ten times faster than before.”

“Yes.”

“So, the reason for that is there’s more meltwater created on the ice surface every summer, because of global warming. That water runs down moulins until it reaches the undersides of the glaciers, and there it has nowhere else to go. So it lifts up the ice a bit. It lubricates the ice flow over the rock beds. The ice used to be in contact with the rock bed, at least in some places, and usually in most places. The ice is so heavy it used to crush out everything under it. It bottomed out. Kilometer thick, that’s a big weight. So the glacier scraped down its bed right on the rock, bottomed out, ice to rock. Even sometimes frozen to rock. Stuck. A good percentage of glacial movement at that point was viscous deformation of the ice downhill, not sliding at all.”

Adele and Pete were nodding at this. Adele was beginning to look thoughtful, Griffen was grinning outright. “And so?” Bob said.

Slawek hesitated and Griffen said, “Come on!”

“Okay. You pump that water out from under the glaciers. Melt drillholes like we already do there when we check out subglacial lakes, or to get through the ice shelves. Technology is well known, and pretty easy. Pump up the water from under the glaciers, and actually, the weight of the ice on it will cause that water to come up a well hole ninety percent of the way, just from pressure of all that weight. Then you pump it up the rest of the way, pipe it away from the glacier onto some stable ice nearby.”

“How much water would that be?” Bob asked.

“All the glaciers together, maybe sixty cubic kilometers. It’s still a lot, but it’s not three thousand six hundred.”

“Or three hundred and sixty thousand!” Adele added. “Which is what a single meter rise in sea level would be.”

“Right. Also, the meltwater at the bottom of the glaciers is really from three sources. Surface water draining down moulins is the new stuff. Then geothermal energy melts a little bit of the glacier’s bottom from below, as always. It never melted much before, except over certain hot spots, but a little. Third source is the shear heat created by ice moving downstream, the friction of that movement. So. Geothermal in most places raises the temperature at the bottom of the glacier to about zero degrees, while up on the surface it can be as cold as forty below. So normally the heat from geothermal mostly diffuses up through the ice, it dissipates like that and so the ice on bottom stays frozen. Just barely, but normally it does. But now, the moulin water drains down there and lubricates a little, then as glacier speeds up going down its bed, the shear heat down there increases, so more heat, more melting, more speed. But if you suck the bottom water out and slow the glacier back down, it won’t shear as much, and you won’t get that friction melt. My modeling suggests that if you pump out about a third to a half of the water underneath the glaciers, you get them to slow down enough to reduce their shear heat also, and that water doesn’t appear in the first place. The glaciers cool down, bottom out, refreeze to the rock, go back to their old speed. So you only need to pump out something like thirty cubic kilometers, from under the biggest glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland.”

“How many glaciers?” Pete asked.

“Say the hundred biggest. It’s not so bad.”

“How many pumps per glacier would you need?” Bob asked.

“Who knows? It would be different for each, I’m sure. Would be an experiment you’d have to keep trying.”

“Expensive,” Bob noted.

“Compared to what?” Pete exclaimed.

Adele laughed. “Jurgen said a quadrillion dollars.”

Slawek nodded, mouth pursed solemnly. “This would cost less.”

They all laughed.

Adele said to him, “So, Slawek, why didn’t you bring this up at the session today? It was about this acceleration of glaciers.”

Slawek quickly shook his head. “Not my thing. A scientist gets into geoengineering, they’re not a scientist anymore, they’re a politician. Get hate mail, rocks through window, no one takes their real work seriously, all that. I’m not ready for that kind of career change. I just want to get back on the Ice while I can still get PQ’ed.”

“But the fate of civilization,” Bob suggested.

Slawek shrugged. “That’s your job, right? So I thought I’d mention it. Or really, Pete thought I’d mention it.”

“Thanks, Slawek,” Pete said. “You are a true glaciologist.”

“I am.”

“I think we should drink another round of Drambers to celebrate that.”

“Me too.”