Underwater walls could stop glaciers from melting

CNN: Building walls on the seafloor could prevent glaciers from melting and sea levels rising due to global warming, scientists say.
Barriers of sand and rock positioned at the base of glaciers would stop ice sheets sliding and collapsing, and prevent warm water from eroding the ice from beneath, according to research published this week in the Cryosphere journal, from the European Geosciences Union.
The audacious idea centers on the construction of “extremely simple structures, merely piles of aggregate on the ocean floor, although more advanced structures could certainly be explored in the future,” said the report’s authors, Michael Wolovick, a researcher at the department of geosciences at Princeton University, and John Moore, professor of climate change at the University of Lapland in Finland.
“While reducing emissions remains the short-term priority for minimizing the effects of climate change, in the long run humanity may need to develop contingency plans to deal with an ice sheet collapse,” they added. In 2016, researchers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the ice in West Antarctica was melting faster than previously thought. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, said increased circulation of warm water beneath the ice shelf was likely the main contributor to ice loss in the region.
Using computer models to gauge the probable impact of walls on erosion of the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, one of the world’s largest, Wolovick and Moore hoped to test the efficiency of “a locally targeted intervention”.
They claimed the simplest designs would allow direct comparison with existing engineering projects.
“The easiest design that we considered would be comparable to the largest civil engineering projects that humanity has ever attempted,” they said. “An ice sheet intervention today would be at the edge of human capabilities.”