By Douglas Fox
Only four ships have ever visited the place where Thwaites Glacier pours off the coast of West Antarctica. This swath of ocean resembles a rugged, white desert — a plain of wind-sculpted ice dotted with sheer-sided mesas that tower seven to 10 stories above the surrounding terrain.
Those mesas are icebergs larger than aircraft carriers. They break from the glacier itself and from the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a dome of ice as large as Mexico slowly oozing seaward like a heap of frozen custard.
As the winds and ocean currents push the icebergs around, they plow through the meter-thick sea ice that covers the water, as if it were the fragile skin that forms on a cooling bowl of tomato soup.
In the coming century, a pivotal drama between humans and nature could play out here. In a quest to slow down sea level rise, a few researchers are sketching out massive engineering and construction projects that could block ocean currents, alter the flow of some of the world’s largest glaciers and potentially delay or prevent a major collapse.
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Douglas MacAyeal was a graduate student at Princeton in 1983 when he read about those proposals to use icebergs as a source of freshwater. Inspired, he submitted a brief abstract to a scientific meeting suggesting a way to prevent glacial flow from speeding up in the face of a warming climate: Large amounts of seawater pumped onto the floating fronts of glaciers would freeze there, thickening the ice and causing it to rest more heavily on submarine mountains beneath. Anchoring the floating ice to submerged mountains would help it buttress and slow the glacier flowing from behind.
MacAyeal never pursued the idea. “That was a time of life for me when I have to write papers that are taken seriously, so I can get a job,” he says. This “silly idea” wouldn’t get him there. He eventually landed at the University of Chicago, rejoining the conversation on glacial engineering only in 2023, as he was retiring.