Scientists want to build underwater walls to keep glaciers from melting.
In a move right out of President Trump’s playbook, researchers want to solve the world’s problems by building a wall.
Some scientists say that building underwater walls could help prevent glaciers from melting away too quickly and contributing to rising sea levels, The Guardian reported Thursday. The Band-Aid solution would help slow the effects of climate change and buy some time to keep warmer water from reaching the glaciers and causing even faster melting.
“We are imagining very simple structures, simply piles of gravel or sand on the ocean floor,” geoscience researcher Michael Wolovick told The Guardian. Wolovick and other researchers at Princeton University found that creating a structure near the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica would have a 30 percent chance of preventing a collapse of the surrounding ice sheet. A 980-foot structure could be made of already-excavated material, turning it into columns or mounds. A more solid underwater wall could have a 70 percent chance of blocking warm water from the Antarctic ice sheet.
Wolovick notes that the solution would merely be a temporary fix, and that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the way to actually keep glaciers from melting. Disintegrating ice is sending fresh water into the world’s oceans, which means rising sea levels and therefore even more glacier melt. But until then, he said, underwater walls are “within the order of magnitude of plausible human achievements.”
