Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier”

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Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier”

The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica, guarding the low-lying ice sheet behind it. But a strong, warm ocean current is weakening its foundations and accelerating its slide into the Amundsen Sea. Scientists fear the waters could topple the walls in the coming decades, kick-starting a runaway process that would crack up the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. That would mark the start of a global climate disaster. The glacier itself holds enough ice to raise ocean levels by more than two feet, which could flood coastlines and force tens of millions of people living in low-lying areas to abandon their homes. The loss of the entire ice sheet—which could still take centuries to unfold—would push up sea levels by 11 feet and redraw the contours of the continents. This is why Thwaites is known as the doomsday glacier—and why scientists are eager to understand just how likely such a collapse is, when it could happen, and if we have the power to stop it. Scientists at MIT and Dartmouth College founded Arête Glacier Initiative last year in the hope of providing clearer answers to these questions. The nonprofit research organization will officially unveil itself, launch its website, and post requests for research proposals today, March 21, timed to coincide with the UN’s inaugural World Day for Glaciers, MIT Technology Review can report exclusively. Arête will also announce it is issuing its first grants, each for around $200,000 over two years, to a pair of glacier researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. One of the organization’s main goals is to study the possibility of preventing the loss of giant glaciers, Thwaites in particular, by refreezing them to the bedrock. It would represent a radical intervention into the natural world, requiring a massive, expensive engineering project in a remote, treacherous environment. But the hope is that such a mega-adaptation project could minimize the mass relocation of climate refugees, prevent much of the suffering and violence that would almost certainly accompany it, and help nations preserve trillions of dollars invested in high-rises, roads, homes, ports, and airports around the globe. “About a million people are displaced per centimeter of sea-level rise,” says Brent Minchew, an associate professor of geophysics at MIT, who cofounded Arête Glacier Initiative and will serve as its chief scientist. “If we’re able to bring that down, even by a few centimeters, then we would safeguard the homes of millions.” But some scientists believe the idea is an implausible, wildly expensive distraction, drawing money, expertise, time, and resources away from more essential polar research efforts. “Sometimes we can get a little over-optimistic about what engineering can do,” says Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Two possible futures” Minchew, who earned his PhD in geophysics at Caltech, says he was drawn to studying glaciers because they are rapidly transforming as the world warms, increasing the dangers of sea-level rise. “But over the years, I became less content with simply telling a more dramatic story about how things were going and more open to asking the question of what can we do about it,” says Minchew, who will return to Caltech as a professor this summer. Last March, he cofounded Arête Glacier Initiative with Colin Meyer, an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth, in the hope of funding and directing research to improve scientific understanding of two big questions: How big a risk does sea-level rise pose in the coming decades, and can we minimize that risk? Brent Minchew, an MIT professor of geophysics, co-founded Arête Glacier Initiative and will serve as its chief scientist.COURTESY: BRENT MINCHEW “Philanthropic funding is needed to address both of these challenges, because there’s no private-sector funding for this kind of research and government funding is minuscule,” says Mike Schroepfer, the former Meta chief technology officer turned climate philanthropist, who provided funding to Arête through his new organization, Outlier Projects. The nonprofit has now raised about $5 million from Outlier and other donors, including the Navigation Fund, the Kissick Family Foundation, the Sky Foundation, the Wedner Family Foundation, and the Grantham Foundation. Minchew says they named the organization Arête, mainly because it’s the sharp mountain ridge between two valleys, generally left behind when a glacier carves out the cirques on either side. It directs the movement of the glacier and is shaped by it. It’s meant to symbolize “two possible futures,” he says. “One where we do something; one where we do nothing.” Improving forecasts The somewhat reassuring news is that, even with rising global temperatures, it may still take thousands of years for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to completely melt. In addition, sea-level rise forecasts for this century generally range from as little as 0.28 meters (11 inches) to 1.10 meters (about three and a half feet), according to the latest UN climate panel report. The latter only occurs under a scenario with very high greenhouse gas emissions (SSP5-8.5), which significantly exceeds the pathway the world is now on. But there’s still a “low-likelihood” that ocean levels could surge nearly two meters (about six and a half feet) by 2100 that “cannot be excluded,” given “deep uncertainty linked to ice-sheet processes,” the report adds. Two meters of sea-level rise could force nearly 190 million people to migrate away from the coasts, unless regions build dikes or other shoreline protections, according to some models. Many more people, mainly in the tropics, would face heightened flooding dangers. Much of the uncertainty over what will happen this century comes down to scientists’ limited understanding of how Antarctic ice sheets will respond to growing climate pressures. The initial goal of Arête Glacier Initiative is to help narrow the forecast ranges by improving our grasp of how Thwaites and other glaciers move, melt, and break apart. Gravity is the driving force nudging glaciers along the bedrock and reshaping them as they flow. But many of the variables that determine how fast they slide lie at the base. That includes the type of sediment the river of ice slides along; the size of the boulders and outcroppings it contorts around; and the warmth and strength of the ocean waters that lap at its face. In addition, heat rising from deep in the earth warms the ice closest to the ground, creating a lubricating layer of water that hastens the glacier’s slide. That acceleration, in turn, generates more frictional heat that melts still more of the ice, creating a self-reinforcing feedback effect. Minchew and Meyer are confident that the glaciology field is at a point where it could speed up progress in sea-level rise forecasting, thanks largely to improving observational tools that are producing more and better data. That includes a new generation of satellites orbiting the planet that can track the shifting shape of ice at the poles at far higher resolutions than in the recent past. Computer simulations of ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice are improving as well, thanks to growing computational resources and advancing machine learning techniques. On March 21, Arête will issue a request for proposals from research teams to contribute to an effort to collect, organize, and openly publish existing observational glacier data. Much of that expensively gathered information is currently inaccessible to researchers around the world, Minchew says. Colin Meyer, an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth, co-founded Arête Glacier Initiative. By funding teams working across these areas, Arête’s founders hope to help produce more refined ice-sheet models and narrower projections of sea-level rise. This improved understanding would help cities plan where to build new bridges, buildings, and homes, and to determine whether they’ll need to erect higher seawalls or raise their roads, Meyer says. It could also provide communities with more advance notice of the coming dangers, allowing them to relocate people and infrastructure to safer places through an organized process known as managed retreat. A radical intervention But the improved forecasts might also tell us that Thwaites is closer to tumbling into the ocean than we think, underscoring the importance of considering more drastic measures. One idea is to build berms or artificial islands to prop up fragile parts of glaciers, and to block the warm waters that rise from the deep ocean and melt them from below. Some researchers have also considered erecting giant, flexible curtains anchored to the seabed to achieve the latter effect. Others have looked at scattering highly reflective beads or other materials across ice sheets, or pumping ocean water onto them in the hopes it would freeze during the winter and reinforce the headwalls of the glaciers. But the concept of refreezing glaciers in place, know as a basal intervention, is gaining traction in scientific circles, in part because there’s a natural analogue for it. The glacier that stalled About 200 years ago, the Kamb Ice Stream, another glacier in West Antarctica that had been sliding about 350 meters (1,150 feet) per year, suddenly stalled. Glaciologists believe an adjacent ice stream intersected with the catchment area under the glacier, providing a path for the water running below it to flow out along the edge instead. That loss of fluid likely slowed down the Kamb Ice Stream, reduced the heat produced through friction, and allowed water at the surface to refreeze. The deceleration of the glacier sparked the idea that humans might be able to bring about that same phenomenon deliberately, perhaps by drilling a series of boreholes down to the bedrock and pumping up water from the bottom. Minchew himself has focused on a variation he believes could avoid much of the power use and heavy operating machinery hassles of that approach: slipping long tubular devices, known as thermosyphons, down nearly to the bottom of the boreholes. These passive heat exchangers, which are powered only by the temperature differential between two areas, are commonly used to keep permafrost cold around homes, buildings and pipelines in Arctic regions. The hope is that we could deploy extremely long ones, stretching up to two kilometers and encased in steel pipe, to draw warm temperatures away from the bottom of the glacier, allowing the water below to freeze. Minchew says he’s in the process of producing refined calculations, but estimates that halting Thwaites could require drilling as many as 10,000 boreholes over a 100-square-kilometer area. He readily acknowledges that would be a huge undertaking, but provides two points of comparison to put such a project into context: Melting the necessary ice to create those holes would require roughly the amount of energy all US domestic flights consume from jet fuel in about two and a half hours. Or, it would produce about the same level of greenhouse gas emissions as constructing 10 kilometers of seawalls, a small fraction of the length the world would need to build if it can’t slow down the collapse of the ice sheets, he says. “Kick the system” One of Arête’s initial grantees is Marianne Haseloff, an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies the physical processes that govern the behavior of glaciers and is striving to more faithfully represent them in ice sheet models. Haseloff says she will use those funds to develop mathematical methods that could more accurately determine what’s known as basal shear stress, or the resistance of the bed to sliding glaciers, based on satellite observations. That could help refine forecasts of how rapidly glaciers will slide into the ocean, in varying settings and climate conditions. Arête’s other initial grant will go to Lucas Zoet, an associate professor in the same department as Haseloff and the principal investigator with the Surface Processes group. He intends to use the funds to build the lab’s second “ring shear” device, the technical term for a simulated glacier. The existing device, which is the only one operating in the world, stands about eight feet tall and fills the better part of a walk-in freezer on campus. The core of the machine is a transparent drum filled with a ring of ice, sitting under pressure and atop a layer of sediment. It slowly spins for weeks at a time as sensors and cameras capture how the ice and earth move and deform. Lucas Zoet, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, stands in front of his lab’s “ring shear” device, a simulated glacier.ETHAN PARRISH The research team can select the sediment, topography, water pressure, temperature, and other conditions to match the environment of a real-world glacier of interest, be it Thwaites today—or Thwaites in 2100, under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. Zoet says these experiments promise to improve our understanding of how glaciers move over different types of beds, and to refine an equation known as the slip law, which represents these glacier dynamics mathematically in computer models. The second machine will enable them to run more experiments and to conduct a specific kind that the current device can’t: a scaled-down, controlled version of the basal intervention. Zoet says the team will be able to drill tiny holes through the ice, then pump out water or transfer heat away from the bed. They can then observe whether the simulated glacier freezes to the base at those points and experiment with how many interventions, across how much space, are required to slow down its movement. It offers a way to test out different varieties of the basal intervention that is far easier and cheaper than using water drills to bore to the bottom of an actual glacier in Antarctica, Zoet says. The funding will allow the lab to explore a wide range of experiments, enabling them to “kick the system in a way we wouldn’t have before,” he adds. “Virtually impossible” The concept of glacier interventions is in its infancy. There are still considerable unknowns and uncertainties, including how much it would cost, how arduous the undertaking would be, and which approach would be most likely to work, or if any of them are feasible. “This is mostly a theoretical idea at this point,” says Katharine Ricke, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, who researches the international relations implications of geoengineering, among other topics. Conducting extensive field trials or moving forward with full-scale interventions may also require surmounting complex legal questions, she says. Antarctica isn’t owned by any nation, but it’s the subject of competing territorial claims among a number of countries and governed under a decades-old treaty to which dozens are a party. The basal intervention—refreezing the glacier to its bed—faces numerous technical hurdles that would make it “virtually impossible to execute,” Moon and dozens of other researchers argued in a recent preprint paper, “Safeguarding the polar regions from dangerous geoengineering.” Among other critiques, they stress that subglacial water systems are complex, dynamic, and interconnected, making it highly difficult to precisely identify and drill down to all the points that would be necessary to remove enough water or add enough heat to substantially slow down a massive glacier. Further, they argue that the interventions could harm polar ecosystems by adding contaminants, producing greenhouse gases, or altering the structure of the ice in ways that may even increase sea-level rise. “Overwhelmingly, glacial and polar geoengineering ideas do not make sense to pursue, in terms of the finances, the governance challenges, the impacts,” and the possibility of making matters worse, Moon says. “No easy path forward” But Douglas MacAyeal, professor emeritus of glaciology at the University of Chicago, says the basal intervention would have the lightest environmental impact among the competing ideas. He adds that nature has already provided an example of it working, and that much of the needed drilling and pumping technology is already in use in the oil industry. “I would say it’s the strongest approach at the starting gate,” he says, “but we don’t really know anything about it yet. The research still has to be done. It’s very cutting-edge.” Minchew readily acknowledges that there are big challenges and significant unknowns—and that some of these ideas may not work. But he says it’s well worth the effort to study the possibilities, in part because much of the research will also improve our understanding of glacier dynamics and the risks of sea-level rise—and in part because it’s only a question of when, not if, Thwaites will collapse. Even if the world somehow halted all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the forces melting that fortress of ice will continue to do so. So one way or another, the world will eventually need to make big, expensive, difficult interventions to protect people and infrastructure. The cost and effort of doing one project in Antarctica, he says, would be small compared to the global effort required to erect thousands of miles of seawalls, ratchet up homes, buildings, and roads, and relocate hundreds of millions of people. “One thing is challenging—and the other is even more challenging,” Minchew says. “There’s no easy path forward.”

The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica, guarding the low-lying ice sheet behind it.

But a strong, warm ocean current is weakening its foundations and accelerating its slide into the Amundsen Sea. Scientists fear the waters could topple the walls in the coming decades, kick-starting a runaway process that would crack up the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

That would mark the start of a global climate disaster. The glacier itself holds enough ice to raise ocean levels by more than two feet, which could flood coastlines and force tens of millions of people living in low-lying areas to abandon their homes.

The loss of the entire ice sheet—which could still take centuries to unfold—would push up sea levels by 11 feet and redraw the contours of the continents.

This is why Thwaites is known as the doomsday glacier—and why scientists are eager to understand just how likely such a collapse is, when it could happen, and if we have the power to stop it.

Scientists at MIT and Dartmouth College founded Arête Glacier Initiative last year in the hope of providing clearer answers to these questions. The nonprofit research organization will officially unveil itself, launch its website, and post requests for research proposals today, March 21, timed to coincide with the UN’s inaugural World Day for Glaciers, MIT Technology Review can report exclusively.

Arête will also announce it is issuing its first grants, each for around $200,000 over two years, to a pair of glacier researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

One of the organization’s main goals is to study the possibility of preventing the loss of giant glaciers, Thwaites in particular, by refreezing them to the bedrock. It would represent a radical intervention into the natural world, requiring a massive, expensive engineering project in a remote, treacherous environment.

But the hope is that such a mega-adaptation project could minimize the mass relocation of climate refugees, prevent much of the suffering and violence that would almost certainly accompany it, and help nations preserve trillions of dollars invested in high-rises, roads, homes, ports, and airports around the globe.

“About a million people are displaced per centimeter of sea-level rise,” says Brent Minchew, an associate professor of geophysics at MIT, who cofounded Arête Glacier Initiative and will serve as its chief scientist. “If we’re able to bring that down, even by a few centimeters, then we would safeguard the homes of millions.”

But some scientists believe the idea is an implausible, wildly expensive distraction, drawing money, expertise, time, and resources away from more essential polar research efforts.

“Sometimes we can get a little over-optimistic about what engineering can do,” says Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“Two possible futures”

Minchew, who earned his PhD in geophysics at Caltech, says he was drawn to studying glaciers because they are rapidly transforming as the world warms, increasing the dangers of sea-level rise.

“But over the years, I became less content with simply telling a more dramatic story about how things were going and more open to asking the question of what can we do about it,” says Minchew, who will return to Caltech as a professor this summer.

Last March, he cofounded Arête Glacier Initiative with Colin Meyer, an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth, in the hope of funding and directing research to improve scientific understanding of two big questions: How big a risk does sea-level rise pose in the coming decades, and can we minimize that risk?

Brent Minchew, an MIT professor of geophysics, co-founded Arête Glacier Initiative and will serve as its chief scientist.

“Philanthropic funding is needed to address both of these challenges, because there’s no private-sector funding for this kind of research and government funding is minuscule,” says Mike Schroepfer, the former Meta chief technology officer turned climate philanthropist, who provided funding to Arête through his new organization, Outlier Projects.

The nonprofit has now raised about $5 million from Outlier and other donors, including the Navigation Fund, the Kissick Family Foundation, the Sky Foundation, the Wedner Family Foundation, and the Grantham Foundation.

Minchew says they named the organization Arête, mainly because it’s the sharp mountain ridge between two valleys, generally left behind when a glacier carves out the cirques on either side. It directs the movement of the glacier and is shaped by it.

It’s meant to symbolize “two possible futures,” he says. “One where we do something; one where we do nothing.”

Improving forecasts

The somewhat reassuring news is that, even with rising global temperatures, it may still take thousands of years for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to completely melt.

In addition, sea-level rise forecasts for this century generally range from as little as 0.28 meters (11 inches) to 1.10 meters (about three and a half feet), according to the latest UN climate panel report. The latter only occurs under a scenario with very high greenhouse gas emissions (SSP5-8.5), which significantly exceeds the pathway the world is now on.

But there’s still a “low-likelihood” that ocean levels could surge nearly two meters (about six and a half feet) by 2100 that “cannot be excluded,” given “deep uncertainty linked to ice-sheet processes,” the report adds.

Two meters of sea-level rise could force nearly 190 million people to migrate away from the coasts, unless regions build dikes or other shoreline protections, according to some models. Many more people, mainly in the tropics, would face heightened flooding dangers.

Much of the uncertainty over what will happen this century comes down to scientists’ limited understanding of how Antarctic ice sheets will respond to growing climate pressures.

The initial goal of Arête Glacier Initiative is to help narrow the forecast ranges by improving our grasp of how Thwaites and other glaciers move, melt, and break apart.

Gravity is the driving force nudging glaciers along the bedrock and reshaping them as they flow. But many of the variables that determine how fast they slide lie at the base. That includes the type of sediment the river of ice slides along; the size of the boulders and outcroppings it contorts around; and the warmth and strength of the ocean waters that lap at its face.

In addition, heat rising from deep in the earth warms the ice closest to the ground, creating a lubricating layer of water that hastens the glacier’s slide. That acceleration, in turn, generates more frictional heat that melts still more of the ice, creating a self-reinforcing feedback effect.

Minchew and Meyer are confident that the glaciology field is at a point where it could speed up progress in sea-level rise forecasting, thanks largely to improving observational tools that are producing more and better data.

That includes a new generation of satellites orbiting the planet that can track the shifting shape of ice at the poles at far higher resolutions than in the recent past. Computer simulations of ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice are improving as well, thanks to growing computational resources and advancing machine learning techniques.

On March 21, Arête will issue a request for proposals from research teams to contribute to an effort to collect, organize, and openly publish existing observational glacier data. Much of that expensively gathered information is currently inaccessible to researchers around the world, Minchew says.

Colin Meyer, an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth, co-founded Arête Glacier Initiative.

By funding teams working across these areas, Arête’s founders hope to help produce more refined ice-sheet models and narrower projections of sea-level rise.

This improved understanding would help cities plan where to build new bridges, buildings, and homes, and to determine whether they’ll need to erect higher seawalls or raise their roads, Meyer says. It could also provide communities with more advance notice of the coming dangers, allowing them to relocate people and infrastructure to safer places through an organized process known as managed retreat.

A radical intervention

But the improved forecasts might also tell us that Thwaites is closer to tumbling into the ocean than we think, underscoring the importance of considering more drastic measures.

One idea is to build berms or artificial islands to prop up fragile parts of glaciers, and to block the warm waters that rise from the deep ocean and melt them from below. Some researchers have also considered erecting giant, flexible curtains anchored to the seabed to achieve the latter effect.

Others have looked at scattering highly reflective beads or other materials across ice sheets, or pumping ocean water onto them in the hopes it would freeze during the winter and reinforce the headwalls of the glaciers.

But the concept of refreezing glaciers in place, know as a basal intervention, is gaining traction in scientific circles, in part because there’s a natural analogue for it.

The glacier that stalled

About 200 years ago, the Kamb Ice Stream, another glacier in West Antarctica that had been sliding about 350 meters (1,150 feet) per year, suddenly stalled.

Glaciologists believe an adjacent ice stream intersected with the catchment area under the glacier, providing a path for the water running below it to flow out along the edge instead. That loss of fluid likely slowed down the Kamb Ice Stream, reduced the heat produced through friction, and allowed water at the surface to refreeze.

The deceleration of the glacier sparked the idea that humans might be able to bring about that same phenomenon deliberately, perhaps by drilling a series of boreholes down to the bedrock and pumping up water from the bottom.

Minchew himself has focused on a variation he believes could avoid much of the power use and heavy operating machinery hassles of that approach: slipping long tubular devices, known as thermosyphons, down nearly to the bottom of the boreholes.

These passive heat exchangers, which are powered only by the temperature differential between two areas, are commonly used to keep permafrost cold around homes, buildings and pipelines in Arctic regions. The hope is that we could deploy extremely long ones, stretching up to two kilometers and encased in steel pipe, to draw warm temperatures away from the bottom of the glacier, allowing the water below to freeze.

Minchew says he’s in the process of producing refined calculations, but estimates that halting Thwaites could require drilling as many as 10,000 boreholes over a 100-square-kilometer area.

He readily acknowledges that would be a huge undertaking, but provides two points of comparison to put such a project into context: Melting the necessary ice to create those holes would require roughly the amount of energy all US domestic flights consume from jet fuel in about two and a half hours. Or, it would produce about the same level of greenhouse gas emissions as constructing 10 kilometers of seawalls, a small fraction of the length the world would need to build if it can’t slow down the collapse of the ice sheets, he says.

“Kick the system”

One of Arête’s initial grantees is Marianne Haseloff, an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies the physical processes that govern the behavior of glaciers and is striving to more faithfully represent them in ice sheet models.

Haseloff says she will use those funds to develop mathematical methods that could more accurately determine what’s known as basal shear stress, or the resistance of the bed to sliding glaciers, based on satellite observations. That could help refine forecasts of how rapidly glaciers will slide into the ocean, in varying settings and climate conditions.

Arête’s other initial grant will go to Lucas Zoet, an associate professor in the same department as Haseloff and the principal investigator with the Surface Processes group.

He intends to use the funds to build the lab’s second “ring shear” device, the technical term for a simulated glacier.

The existing device, which is the only one operating in the world, stands about eight feet tall and fills the better part of a walk-in freezer on campus. The core of the machine is a transparent drum filled with a ring of ice, sitting under pressure and atop a layer of sediment. It slowly spins for weeks at a time as sensors and cameras capture how the ice and earth move and deform.

Lucas Zoet, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, stands in front of his lab’s “ring shear” device, a simulated glacier.

The research team can select the sediment, topography, water pressure, temperature, and other conditions to match the environment of a real-world glacier of interest, be it Thwaites today—or Thwaites in 2100, under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario.

Zoet says these experiments promise to improve our understanding of how glaciers move over different types of beds, and to refine an equation known as the slip law, which represents these glacier dynamics mathematically in computer models.

The second machine will enable them to run more experiments and to conduct a specific kind that the current device can’t: a scaled-down, controlled version of the basal intervention.

Zoet says the team will be able to drill tiny holes through the ice, then pump out water or transfer heat away from the bed. They can then observe whether the simulated glacier freezes to the base at those points and experiment with how many interventions, across how much space, are required to slow down its movement.

It offers a way to test out different varieties of the basal intervention that is far easier and cheaper than using water drills to bore to the bottom of an actual glacier in Antarctica, Zoet says. The funding will allow the lab to explore a wide range of experiments, enabling them to “kick the system in a way we wouldn’t have before,” he adds.

“Virtually impossible”

The concept of glacier interventions is in its infancy. There are still considerable unknowns and uncertainties, including how much it would cost, how arduous the undertaking would be, and which approach would be most likely to work, or if any of them are feasible.

“This is mostly a theoretical idea at this point,” says Katharine Ricke, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, who researches the international relations implications of geoengineering, among other topics.

Conducting extensive field trials or moving forward with full-scale interventions may also require surmounting complex legal questions, she says. Antarctica isn’t owned by any nation, but it’s the subject of competing territorial claims among a number of countries and governed under a decades-old treaty to which dozens are a party.

The basal intervention—refreezing the glacier to its bed—faces numerous technical hurdles that would make it “virtually impossible to execute,” Moon and dozens of other researchers argued in a recent preprint paper, “Safeguarding the polar regions from dangerous geoengineering.”

Among other critiques, they stress that subglacial water systems are complex, dynamic, and interconnected, making it highly difficult to precisely identify and drill down to all the points that would be necessary to remove enough water or add enough heat to substantially slow down a massive glacier.

Further, they argue that the interventions could harm polar ecosystems by adding contaminants, producing greenhouse gases, or altering the structure of the ice in ways that may even increase sea-level rise.

“Overwhelmingly, glacial and polar geoengineering ideas do not make sense to pursue, in terms of the finances, the governance challenges, the impacts,” and the possibility of making matters worse, Moon says.

“No easy path forward”

But Douglas MacAyeal, professor emeritus of glaciology at the University of Chicago, says the basal intervention would have the lightest environmental impact among the competing ideas. He adds that nature has already provided an example of it working, and that much of the needed drilling and pumping technology is already in use in the oil industry.

“I would say it’s the strongest approach at the starting gate,” he says, “but we don’t really know anything about it yet. The research still has to be done. It’s very cutting-edge.”

Minchew readily acknowledges that there are big challenges and significant unknowns—and that some of these ideas may not work.

But he says it’s well worth the effort to study the possibilities, in part because much of the research will also improve our understanding of glacier dynamics and the risks of sea-level rise—and in part because it’s only a question of when, not if, Thwaites will collapse.

Even if the world somehow halted all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the forces melting that fortress of ice will continue to do so.

So one way or another, the world will eventually need to make big, expensive, difficult interventions to protect people and infrastructure. The cost and effort of doing one project in Antarctica, he says, would be small compared to the global effort required to erect thousands of miles of seawalls, ratchet up homes, buildings, and roads, and relocate hundreds of millions of people.

“One thing is challenging—and the other is even more challenging,” Minchew says. “There’s no easy path forward.”

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Brent retreats from highs after Trump signals Iran war nearing end

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Southwest Arkansas lithium project moves toward FID with 10-year offtake deal

Smackover Lithium, a joint venture between Standard Lithium Ltd. and Equinor, through subsidiaries of Equinor ASA, signed the first commercial offtake agreement for the South West Arkansas Project (SWA Project) with commodities group Trafigura Trading LLC. Under the terms of a binding take-or-pay offtake agreement, the JV will supply Trafigura with 8,000 metric tonnes/year (tpy) of battery-quality lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) over a 10-year period, beginning at the start of commercial production. Smackover Lithium is expected to achieve final investment decision (FID) for the project, which aims to use direct lithium extraction technology to produce lithium from brine resources in the Smackover formation in southern Arkansas, in 2026, with first production anticipated in 2028. The project encompasses about 30,000 acres of brine leases in the region, with the initial phase of project development focused on production from the 20,854-acre Reynolds Brine Unit. Front-end engineering design was completed in support of a definitive feasibility study with a principal recommendation that the project is ready to progress to FID. While pricing terms of the Trafigura deal were kept confidential, Standard Lithium said they are “structured to support the anticipated financing for the project.” The JV is seeking to finalize customer offtake agreements for roughly 80% of the 22,500 tonnes of annual nameplate lithium carbonate capacity for the initial phase of the project. This agreement represents over 40% of the targeted offtake commitments. Formed in 2024, Smackover Lithium is developing multiple DLE projects in Southwest Arkansas and East Texas. Standard Lithium is operator of the projecs with 55% interest. Equinor holds the remaining 45% interest.

Equinor makes oil and gas discoveries in the North Sea

Equinor Energy AS discovered oil in the Troll area and gas and condensate in the Sleipner area of the North Sea. Byrding C discovery well 35/11-32 S in production license (PL) 090 HS was made 5 km northwest of Fram field in Troll. The well was drilled by the COSL Innovator rig in 373 m of water to 3,517 m TVD subsea. It was terminated in the Heather formation from the Middle Jurassic. The primary exploration target was to prove petroleum in reservoir rocks from the Late Jurassic deep marine equivalent to the Sognefjord formation. The secondary target was to prove petroleum and investigate the presence of potential reservoir rocks in two prospective intervals from the Middle Jurassic in deep marine equivalents to the Fensfjord formation. The well encountered a 22-m oil column in sandstone layers in the Sognefjord formation with a total thickness of 82 m, of which 70 m was sandstone with moderate to good reservoir properties. The oil-water contact was encountered. The secondary exploration target in the Fensfjord formation did not prove reservoir rocks or hydrocarbons. The well was not formation-tested, but data and samples were collected. The well has been permanently plugged. Preliminary estimates indicate the size of the discovery is 4.4–8.2 MMboe. Oil discovered in Byrding C will be produced using existing or future infrastructure in the area. The Frida Kahlo discovery was drilled from the Sleipner B platform in production license PL 046 northwest of Sleipner Vest and is estimated to contain 5–9 MMboe of gas and condensate. The well will be brought on stream as early as April. The four most recent exploration wells in the Sleipner area, drilled over a 3-month period, include Lofn, Langemann, Sissel, and Frida Kahlo. All have all proven gas and condensate in the Hugin formation, with combined estimated

IEA launches record strategic oil release as Middle East war disrupts supply

The International Energy Agency (IEA) on Mar. 11 approved the largest emergency oil stock release in its history, making 400 million bbl available from member-country reserves in response to market disruptions tied to the war in the Middle East. The coordinated action, agreed unanimously by the IEA’s 32 member countries, is intended to ease supply pressure and temper price volatility as crude markets react to disrupted flows through the Strait of Hormuz. “The conflict in the Middle East is having significant impacts on global oil and gas markets, with major implications for energy security, energy affordability and the global economy for oil,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said. The release more than doubles the previous IEA record set in 2022, when member countries collectively made 182.7 million bbl available following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Under the IEA system, member countries are required to maintain emergency oil stocks equal to at least 90 days of net imports, giving the agency a mechanism to respond when severe disruptions threaten global supply. The move comes after crude prices surged amid concerns that the US-Iran war could lead to prolonged disruption of exports from the Gulf. Despite the planned stock release, traders remain uncertain about whether reserve barrels alone will be enough to offset losses if the disruption persists. IEA said the emergency barrels will be supplied to the market from government-controlled and obligated industry stocks held across member countries. The action marks the sixth coordinated stock release in the agency’s history and underscores the seriousness of the current supply shock. Earlier the day, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said that Japan might start using its strategic oil reserves as early as next week, citing Japan’s unusually high dependence on Middle Eastern crude oil.

Infographic: Strait of Hormuz energy trade 2025

BOEM: US OCS holds 65.8 billion bbl of technically recoverable reserves

The US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) holds mean undiscovered technically recoverable resources (UTRR) of 65.8 billion bbl of oil and 218.43 tcf of natural gas, the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) said Mar. 9. Based on current production trends, these undiscovered resources represent the potential for 100 or more years of energy production from the US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), BOEM said. A large portion of undiscovered OSC resources is located offshore the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, according to the report. The offshore Gulf holds 26.9 million bbl of oil and 45.59 tcf of gas, while offshore Alaska holds an estimated mean 24.1 million bbl of oil and 122.29 tcf of gas. Offshore Pacific holds a mean UTRR of 10.3 million barrels of oil and 16.2 trillion cubic feet of gas, the report said. Offshore Atlantic holds a mean UTRR of 10.3 billion barrels of oil and 16.2 trillion cubic feet of gas. The assessment also evaluates the impact of prices on hydrocarbon recovery. Alaska is particularly price-sensitive, with mean undiscovered economically recoverable resources (UERR) negligible until prices average $100/bbl and $17.79/Mcf. At those levels, the mean UERR stands at 6.25 billion bbl and 13.25 tcf. At $160/bbl and $28.47/Mcf, recoverable resources jump to 14.67 billion bbl and 58.78 tcf. In the Gulf of Mexico, the mean UERR is 17.51 billion bbl of oil and 13.71 tcf at average prices of $60/bbl and $3.20/Mcf, increasing to 20.51 billion bbl and 17.49 tcf at average prices of $100/bbl and $5.34/Mcf, respectively. BOEM conducts a national resource assessment every 4 years to understand the “distribution of undiscovered oil and gas resources on the OCS” and identify opportunities for additional oil and gas exploration and development. “The Outer Continental Shelf holds tremendous resource potential,” said BOEM Acting Director Matt Giacona. “This

Palantir partners with Nvidia to streamline AI data center deployment

This collaboration grants enterprises full control over their data, AI models, and applications while supporting the use of open-source AI models and related data acceleration tools. The Palantir AI OS reference architecture gives enterprises total control over their data, AI models and applications. It is particularly critical for customers with existing GPU infrastructure, latency-sensitive workflows, data sovereignty requirements, and high geographic distribution. “From our first deployment with the United States government and in every deployment since, our software has had to meet the moment in the most complex and sensitive environments where customers must maintain control,” says Akshay Krishnaswamy, Palantir’s chief architect in a statement. “Together with Nvidia — and building on many customers’ existing investments — we are proud to deliver a fully integrated AI operating system that is optimized for Nvidia accelerated compute infrastructure and enables customers to realize the promise of on-premises, edge, and sovereign cloud deployments,” he added. Sovereign AI is an emerging market that represents a country’s efforts to develop and maintain control of its own AI, using its own data, and keeping the data within its borders.

Who’s in the data-center space race?

But not everyone is that optimistic. According to Gartner, space-based data centers won’t be useful for decades, so companies should focus on expanding capacity down here on Earth. “I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told The Indian Express in February. Current satellite computing can’t easily scale to data centers, agrees Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research. “Weight is still the restriction,” he says. “It’s the equivalent of you buying a tablet or small laptop to travel across Latin America versus putting in a data center in the Amazon. Different power requirements, investment, totally different setup.” Then there are issues like damaged solar panels from meteorite storms and satellite debris, he adds. “You would have to pay for operational redundancy, which is further investment.” “Data centers will be built where they are affordable,” he says. “I don’t see space happening soon. Remember the Microsoft submerged one? Crickets…” But he agrees that solar power is nice, though the sun is only visible from one side of the planet at any given time. And space is cold, he says. Cooling down in outer space In fact, space is very cold. Close to absolute zero cold. But vacuum is also a great insulator, and there’s no air to move the heat around. “You can’t convect heat away,” says Richard Bonner, CTO at Accelsius, a liquid cooling company. Bonner has worked on NASA research projects about the challenge of cooling in space and is very familiar with the problem. A small proportion of the heat might be turned back into useful electricity, but that’s not really a solution, he says, because computer chips don’t get quite that hot. Instead, heat is radiated. When an object warms up, it generates

Community Opposition Emerges as New Gatekeeper for AI Data Center Expansion

The rapid global buildout of AI infrastructure is colliding with a new constraint that hyperscalers cannot solve with capital or GPUs: local opposition. In the first months of 2026, community resistance has already begun reshaping the development pipeline. A February analysis by Sightline Climate estimates that 30–50 percent of the data center capacity expected to come online in 2026 may not be delivered on schedule, reflecting a growing set of constraints that now include power availability, permitting challenges, and increasingly organized local opposition. The financial stakes are already substantial. Recent reporting indicates that tens of billions of dollars in planned data center development have been delayed or halted amid community pushback, including an estimated $98 billion worth of projects delayed or blocked in a single quarter of 2025, according to research cited by Data Center Watch. What had been framed throughout 2024 and 2025 as an inevitable expansion of hyperscale campuses, gigawatt-scale power agreements, and AI “factory” clusters is now encountering a different kind of gatekeeper: the communities expected to host the infrastructure. The shift is already visible in project outcomes. Across the United States, multiple projects were canceled, blocked, or fundamentally reshaped in the opening months of 2026 due to organized local opposition. Reporting from The Guardian found that 26 data center projects were canceled in December and January, compared with just one cancellation in October, suggesting that community resistance campaigns are increasingly capable of stopping projects before construction begins. At the same time, local governments are responding to community pressure with moratoriums, zoning restrictions, and permitting delays that can stall projects long enough to jeopardize financing or push developers to seek more favorable jurisdictions. While opposition to data center development is not new, the scale, coordination, and success rate of these efforts suggest a structural shift in how

From Real Estate to AI Factories: 7×24 Exchange’s Michael Siteman on Power, Politics, and the New Logic of Data Center Development

The data center industry’s explosive growth in the AI era is transforming how projects are conceived, financed, and built. What was once a real estate-driven business has become something far more complex: an engineering and infrastructure challenge defined by power availability, network topology, and local politics. That was one of the key themes in this recent episode of the Data Center Frontier Show podcast, where Editor-in-Chief Matt Vincent spoke with Michael Siteman, President of Prodigious Proclivities and a longtime leader and board member within 7×24 Exchange International. Drawing on decades of experience spanning brokerage, development, connectivity strategy, and infrastructure advisory, Siteman offered a field-level view of how the industry is adapting to the demands of AI-driven infrastructure. “The business used to be a pure real estate play,” Siteman said. “Now it’s a systems engineering problem. It’s power, network topology, the real estate itself, and political risk—all of these factors that have to work together.” Site Selection Becomes Systems Engineering For much of the early data center era, location decisions revolved around traditional real estate considerations: available buildings, proximity to customers, and nearby fiber connectivity. That logic has fundamentally changed. “Years ago, the question was: Is there a building? Are there carriers nearby?” Siteman recalled. “Now it’s completely different. Power availability, network topology, community acceptance—these are the variables that define whether a site works.” Utilities themselves have become gatekeepers in the process. “You go to a utility and ask if there’s power,” he explained. “They might say, ‘We might have power, but you have to pay us to study whether we actually have power.’” In many regions experiencing rapid digital infrastructure expansion, the answer increasingly comes back the same: there simply isn’t enough grid capacity available. Power Becomes the Project In the gigawatt-scale era of AI infrastructure, power strategy has moved

Meta’s Expanded MTIA Roadmap Signals a New Phase in AI Data Center Architecture

Silicon as a Data Center Design Tool Custom silicon also allows hyperscale operators to shape the physical characteristics of the infrastructure around it. Traditional GPU platforms often arrive with fixed power envelopes and thermal constraints. But internally designed accelerators allow companies like Meta to tailor chips to the rack-level power and cooling budgets of their own data center architecture. That flexibility becomes increasingly important as AI infrastructure pushes power densities far beyond traditional enterprise deployments. Custom accelerators like MTIA can be engineered to fit within the liquid-to-chip cooling frameworks now emerging in hyperscale AI racks. These systems circulate coolant directly across cold plates attached to processors, removing heat far more efficiently than air cooling and enabling higher compute densities. For operators running thousands of racks across multiple campuses, small improvements in performance-per-watt can translate into enormous reductions in total power demand. Software-Defined Power One of the subtler advantages of custom silicon lies in how it interacts with data center power systems. By controlling chip-level power management features such as power capping and workload throttling, operators can fine-tune how servers consume electricity inside each rack. This creates opportunities to safely run racks closer to their electrical limits without triggering breaker trips or thermal overloads. In practice, that means data center operators can extract more useful compute from the same electrical infrastructure. At hyperscale, where campuses may draw hundreds of megawatts, these efficiencies have a direct impact on capital planning and grid interconnection requirements. The Interconnect Layer AI accelerators do not operate in isolation. Their effectiveness depends heavily on how they connect to memory, storage, and other compute nodes across the cluster. Industry analysts expect next-generation inference platforms to rely increasingly on high-speed interconnect technologies such as CXL (Compute Express Link) and advanced networking fabrics to support disaggregated memory architectures and low-latency

PJM Moves to Redefine Behind-the-Meter Power for AI Data Centers

PJM Interconnection is moving to rewrite how behind-the-meter power is treated across its grid, signaling a major shift as AI-scale data centers push electricity demand into territory the current regulatory framework was never designed to handle. For years, PJM’s retail behind-the-meter generation rules allowed customers with onsite generation to “net” their load, reducing the amount of demand counted for transmission and other grid-related charges. The framework dates back to 2004, when behind-the-meter generation was typically associated with smaller industrial facilities or campus-style energy systems. PJM now argues that those assumptions no longer hold. The arrival of very large co-located loads, particularly hyperscale and AI data centers seeking hundreds of megawatts of power on accelerated timelines, has exposed gaps in how the system accounts for and plans around those facilities. In February 2026, PJM asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve a tariff rewrite that would sharply limit how new large loads can rely on legacy netting rules. The move reflects a broader challenge facing grid operators as the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure begins to collide with planning frameworks built for a far slower era of demand growth. The proposal follows directly from a December 18, 2025 order from FERC finding that PJM’s existing tariff was “unjust and unreasonable” because it lacked clear rates, terms, and conditions governing co-location arrangements between large loads and generating facilities. Rather than prohibiting co-location, the commission directed PJM to create transparent rules allowing data centers and other large consumers to pair with generation while still protecting system reliability and other ratepayers. In essence, FERC told PJM not to shut the door on these arrangements, but to stop improvising and build a formal framework capable of supporting them. Why Behind-the-Meter Power Matters Behind-the-meter arrangements have become one of the most attractive strategies for hyperscale

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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