IF planting more trees can replenish forests and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, then could we also repopulate the Arctic with ice? That’s a question posed by a team of Indonesian designers with an eye-catching response to the climate crisis: iceberg-making submarines. The idea, recently named runner-up in an international design competition appealing for radical approaches to sustainability, is the latest in a series of new proposals for “refreezing” the Earth’s poles — from sprinkling them with artificial sand to blasting seawater into the sky to brighten the clouds. Led by 29-year-old architect Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, the group envisaged a submersible vessel capable of producing 16-foot-thick (4.88-meter-thick), 82-foot-wide hexagonal icebergs. The process would begin with the submarine dipping beneath the surface to fill its central cavity with seawater. Salt would then be filtered out, raising the water’s freezing point, after which a hatch would close over the chamber to protect it from the sun. An iceberg would then form naturally inside, before being ejected a month later. According to the team behind the project, the hexagonal shape may encourage the icebergs (or “ice babies” as Kotahatuhaha refers to them) to interlock with one another and form larger frozen masses. Andrew Shepherd, a professor at the U.K.’s Leeds University, described the idea as an “interesting engineering solution,” though he questioned the project’s scalability. He estimated that replacing polar ice at the same rate it has disappeared in the last four decades would require around 10 million submarines. (SD-Agencies) |