Researchers at Arizona State University have a plan to ease the effects of climate change on the Arctic by building 10 million wind-powered water pumps to make more ice, NBC News reported.
An estimated cost for the project would be $50 billion per year.
Arctic sea ice has been declining at a rate of 13.3 percent per decade, caused by a mixture of global warming and natural climate variability.
"Arctic Ice Management," published in late January in the American Geophysical Union's journal Earth's Future, proposes enhancing Arctic sea ice production by using wind power during the Arctic winter to pump 1.4 meters of seawater to the surface. The water would freeze more readily during the winter and produce an additional meter of ice in a single winter.
The windmill would give power to the pump, and the buoy would keep the device afloat during the summer. The force of the water from the hose would help spread the water around the windmill.
"We examine the effects this has in the Arctic climate, concluding that deployment over 10 percent of the Arctic, especially where ice survival is marginal, could more than reverse current trends of ice loss in the Arctic, using existing industrial capacity," the researchers wrote.
"The scale of climate change and associated problems is so large it paralyzes us into inaction," wrote Steven Desch. "But we can make real progress in the Arctic by putting people to work and using just a fraction of the industrial capacity that accidentally caused climate change in the first place."
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