The glacier alone is responsible for about one percent of global sea level rise] “Just as many humans take supplements to counter bone mass loss after a certain age, there may be low-cost, low-impact, logistically simple methods to counter ice sheet mass loss,” Dr. Ken Mankoff, senior scientific programmer at New York’s NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told The Independent via email on Thursday.
Glaciers have white surfaces that reflect the sun's rays, helping to keep Earth’s climate mild] This strategy would pump water either into or out of the cracks between the ice and the Earth’s rocky crust to control that friction and potentially slow down a glacier’s movement.
“Whole-planet interventions like stratospheric aerosol injection would also benefit the ice sheets, although they would probably have a bigger immediate impact on Greenland than Antarctica, because Greenland loses more mass to surface melt at the present day,” he noted.
The water would then freeze over and thicken the ice to the point where it would also increase the friction, making the ice shelves so thick that they can’t even move over bays.
“Many of them are likely to have unintended consequences for the environment or may even alter the ice, be it the glacier or sea ice surface, in ways that can actually exacerbate the problem.”.
