The Ministry for the Future

36

The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover melted entirely away in the late summer of 2032, and the winter sea ice that formed in the following winter was less than a meter thick, and broken up by winds and currents into jumbled islands of pancake ice, separated by skim ice or brash ice or even open leads and internal ice-bordered seas many kilometers wide, so that when spring came and the sun hit, that winter’s skimpy ice quickly melted and the constant summer sunlight penetrated deep into the Arctic waters, which it warmed quite a bit, which thus thinned the next winter’s ice even more.

This was a feedback loop with teeth. The Arctic ice cap, which at its first measurement in the 1950s was more than ten meters thick, had been a big part of the Earth’s albedo; during northern summers it had reflected as much as two or three percent of the sun’s incoming insolation back into space. Now that light was instead spearing into the ocean and heating it up. And for reasons not fully understood, the Arctic and the Antarctic were already the most rapidly warming places on Earth. This meant also that the permafrost ringing the Arctic in Siberia and Alaska and Canada and Greenland and Scandinavia was melting faster and faster; which meant the release of a great deal of permafrost carbon, and also methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times stronger than CO₂ in its ability to capture heat in the atmosphere. Arctic permafrost contained as much stored methane as all the Earth’s cattle would create and emit over six centuries, and this giant burp, if released, would almost certainly push Earth over an irreversible tipping point into jungle planet mode, completely ice-free; at which point sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with global average temperatures at least 5 or 6 degrees Celsius higher and probably more, rendering great stretches of the Earth uninhabitable by humans. At that point civilization would be over. Some remainder of humanity might adapt to the new biosphere, but they would be a post-traumatic remnant, in a post-mass-extinction world.

That being the case, efforts were being made to thicken the Arctic sea ice in winter, which would allow it to hold on longer through the summers.

These efforts were awkward at best. Arctic winters were still sunless and cold, and a skim of ice covered most of the sea. And there was no good and obvious method to thicken that ice. So to begin with, a number of methods were tried and evaluated. One involved running autonomous amphibious craft over the outer edge of the winter sea ice as soon as it formed, each craft pumping up seawater from the still liquid ocean nearby, then spraying it into the air in a fine spray that would freeze before it came down, this flocking making thicker the outermost border of the sea ice, and hopefully thus slowing its breakup when the sun arrived in spring.

This worked, in a limited way, but it would take thousands of such vehicles to adequately thicken the sea ice, and each vehicle could only be created at the expense of a certain amount of carbon burned into the atmosphere. Nevertheless it was felt worth doing, despite the expense in money, materials, and carbon burn associated with construction of the amphibians. Now that the cost of losing the sea ice was clearly seen to be hugely more important than the financial cost of preventing the loss, the financial cost was no longer a stopper to this plan proceeding.

Then, as airship factories were proliferating all around the world, it was possible to make some that would fly over the Arctic sea ice every winter, powered by batteries, pumping up water from holes punched in the thinnest sea ice, to fill tanks and then spray that water onto the surface ice below, where it also froze and fell as flocking, and thus thickened the ice. As in the Antarctic pumping efforts, it felt at first like sucking the ocean through a drinking straw: miniscule efforts! Teensy effects! A sick little joke! But every good work has to begin somewhere. And really, if these projects didn’t succeed, what would follow was so dire to contemplate that the efforts were judged worth making, miniscule or not.

The third method was to drop on the winter ice clouds of small plastic machines, each of which had a solar panel and a drill and a pump and a little sprayer, so that the machine could puncture the ice, draw up some water, and cast it into the air to freeze. Eventually these machines would get buried in snow by way of their own efforts, and then they would shut off and wait for spring and summer to come, when they would float to the surface, if enough snow melted, and wait to be refrozen into the top of the ice the following fall, where they could start all over again. Thousands and then even millions of these could be distributed. If their work went well enough, they would eventually stay trapped in the thickening sea ice for centuries to come—they were even small bits of carbon sequestration, as some pointed out in little attempts at a joke.

But still, it was awkward, very awkward. Awkward as hell. Nothing they tried in this effort worked very well. Which meant…