The UArctic library of climate interventions to actively conserve the Earth’s cold regions

In 2019, an Indonesian design team came up with the idea of a submersible device that could take in sea water, desalinate it, and then have it freeze into a solid block they called a “new ice baby” (Griffiths, 2019).

It has been suggested that ice sheets could be stabilized by reducing the lubrication effect of water below the ice sheet.

With rising Arctic temperatures, there have been major changes in iceberg production rates from marine terminating glaciers. These icebergs drift into warmer sea waters where they will slowly melt.

Sea ice thickening is an idea to slow or reverse the decline of Arctic sea ice by artificially thickening it.

Apart from thickening sea ice by directly adding mass to it (see sea ice thickening), it has been suggested that the ice could also be protected by increasing its albedo and thereby reducing the amount of absorbed energy (Field et al. 2018).

It has recently been suggested that hollow glass microspheres (HGM, see also see sea ice albedo increase) could be used to increase the albedo of mountain glaciers and thereby slow their melt.

Increasing precipitation on a glacier would add to the glacier's mass, thereby directly countering the melting. Also, the snow that falls would increase glacial albedo, and thereby reduce the amount of absorbed energy.

Several high mountain communities around the world have a long history of building barriers and other constructions that trap or hold meltwater by refreezing it (Nüsser et al. 2019b).

There is a suggestion to use localized surface technologies to create artificial snow cover on mountain glaciers Oerlemans et al. (2017).

Engineer Paul Klinkman has suggested increasing the water content around glaciers and ice sheets to increase precipitation over them (see Klinkman Solar Design, U2).

Roughly one-third of the incoming solar radiation is directly reflected back into space by the Earth’s atmosphere and surface albedo. Clouds play an important role in this, although their role is double as water droplets can also interfere with outgoing longwave radiation, thereby contributing to the greenhouse effect. Over open water clouds can make a particularly big difference as the albedo of the water is below 0.1, thereby absorbing most of the sun’s energy.

One method to increase the albedo of individual glaciers already in use is to wrap them in reflective materials.