A few hundred meters out of the coastline, Lofoten, Norway.
Year: 2018
Sea ice is simply frozen ocean water. It forms, grows, and melts in the ocean. In contrast, icebergs, glaciers, ice sheets, and ice shelves all originate on land.
Year: 1991
Photographer: Peter Prokosch
An ice shelf is a thick platform of ice that forms at the grounding line of a glacier, where the glacier meets the coastline.
Year: 2016
Photographer: Peter Prokosch
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.
Unlike the Arctic, which at its center is an ocean, Antarctica is a landmass that is surrounded by the Southern Ocean.
Year: 2016
Photographer: Peter Prokosch
Similar to other ideas to pump water on sea ice (see Sea ice thickening), engineer Sev Clarke (Planetary Restoration n.d.) and engineering student Katy Cartlidge (University of Cambridge 2022) both came up with designs to artificially produce sea ice.
Sea ice is frozen seawater that floats on the ocean surface. It forms in both the Arctic and the Antarctic in each hemisphere’s winter, and it retreats, but does not completely disappear, in the summer.
Year: 2015
Photographer: Peter Prokosch
In 2010, Veli Albert Kallio suggested the use of ‘floating cables or levees, even platforms’, to act as ‘seeding points to fasten the seasonal growth of the Arctic Ocean's sea ice’ (Geoengineering Google Groups n.d.)
The ice in glaciers has been under enormous pressure for eons. The compression eliminates air and reflective surfaces within the ice.
Year: 2014
Photographer: Peter Prokosch
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).
