Is it Curtains for Glaciers? Slowing Down Polar Melting, with Professor John Moore, University of Lapland

Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org

As the Earth gets warmer, the world’s glaciers get smaller. Land-based glaciers in the Earth’s polar regions hold enormous quantities of water and, as they melt, the runoff is raising sea levels and disrupting ocean systems, such as the Gulf Stream. The obvious solution is for us to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions but, even if we were to do that, the Earth would continue to warm and the glaciers would continue to melt. Is there anything we could do to slow the melt?

There are a growing number of proposals to intervene in Earth’s systems—called “geoengineering” as a way to moderate climate change. Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Research Professor John Moore, who is a glaciologist in Rovaniemi, Finland at the University of Lapland’s University of the Arctic. His solution to slowing glacier melt is the construction of barriers at glaciers’ underwater bases in order to slow or prevent flows of warmer ocean water from carving away at the ice.