Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier”

Stay Ahead, Stay ONMINE

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.”

Stay Ahead

Explore More Insights

Stay ahead with more perspectives on cutting-edge power, infrastructure, energy, bitcoin and AI solutions. Explore these articles to uncover strategies and insights shaping the future of industries.

IBM X-Force: Stealthy attacks on the rise, toolkits targeting AI emerge

Last year, X-Force predicted that once AI technologies “establish market dominance—when a single technology approaches 50% market share or when the market consolidates to three or fewer technologies—attackers will be incentivized to invest in attack toolkits” that target AI models and solutions. “Are we there yet? Not quite, but adoption

VMware (quietly) brings back its free ESXi hypervisor

By many accounts, Broadcom’s handling of the VMware acquisition was clumsy and caused many enterprises to reevaluate their relationship with the vendor The move to subscription models was tilted in favor of larger customers and longer, three-year licenses. Because the string of bad publicity and VMware’s competitors pounced, offering migration

CoreWeave offers cloud-based Grace Blackwell GPUs for AI training

Cloud services provider CoreWeave has announced it is offering Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 systems, otherwise known as “Grace Blackwell,” to customers looking to do intensive AI training. CoreWeave said its portfolio of cloud services are optimized for the GB200 NVL72, including CoreWeave’s Kubernetes Service, Slurm on Kubernetes (SUNK), Mission Control, and

Kyndryl launches private cloud services for enterprise AI deployments

Kyndryl’s AI Private Cloud environment includes services and capabilities around containerization, data science tools, and microservices to deploy and manage AI applications on the private cloud. The service supports AI data foundations and MLOps/LLMOps services, letting customers manage their AI data pipelines and machine learning operation, Kyndryl stated. These tools facilitate

US Energy Expands Carbon Capture Assets With New Acquisition

U.S. Energy Corporation strengthened its industrial gas and carbon capture platform in Montana by acquiring a privately held company for $0.2 million. With the acquisition, U.S. Energy secured approximately 2,300 net acres with carbon dioxide (CO2) rights that are highly contiguous to its existing position across Montana’s Kevin Dome structure. Additionally, the acquisition includes an active Class II injection well to sequester CO2 captured from U.S. Energy’s upcoming industrial gas processing facility, the company said in a media release. The permitted well advances the company’s carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) initiatives within its industrial gas development platform, U.S. Energy said. The Class II injection well is a key part of U.S. Energy’s plan to store CO2 from its upcoming gas processing facility. The well has active permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act’s Underground Injection Control Program (UIC), ensuring compliance with regulations for safe CO2 storage, the company said. U.S. Energy added that the acquisition adds CCUS-ready infrastructure and supports its strategy to develop low-emission gas operations while establishing itself as a U.S. supplier of clean helium and other essential gases. “This acquisition marks a meaningful milestone forward in our efforts to integrate carbon sequestration into our industrial gas platform” Ryan Smith, Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Energy, said. “The addition of permitted injection infrastructure and strategic acreage strengthens our position across the Kevin Dome and accelerates our ability to deliver clean, domestically sourced helium while sequestering CO₂ at scale. We are committed to executing a responsible growth strategy that aligns with global demand for lower-carbon energy solutions”. The acquisition enhances U.S. Energy’s control over a contiguous acreage block in the Kevin Dome, a geological formation recognized for its helium-rich and CO₂-dominated gas systems. The company plans to present a Monitoring, Reporting,

Carney, Poilievre Scrap Over Energy and Housing in Canada Debate

Liberal Party Leader Mark Carney argued that he represents change from Justin Trudeau’s nine years in power as he fended off attacks from his rivals during the final televised debate of Canada’s election. “Look, I’m a very different person from Justin Trudeau,” Carney said in response to comments from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, his chief opponent in the election campaign that concludes April 28. Carney’s Liberals lead by several percentage points in most polls, marking a stunning reversal from the start of this year, when Trudeau was still the party’s leader and Poilievre’s Conservatives were ahead by more than 20 percentage points in some surveys. Trudeau’s resignation and US President Donald Trump’s economic and sovereignty threats against Canada have upended the race. Poilievre sought to remind Canadians of their complaints about the Liberal government, while Carney tried to distance himself from Trudeau’s record. Poilievre argued that Carney was an adviser to Trudeau’s Liberals during a time when energy projects were stymied and the cost of living soared — especially housing prices. Carney, 60, responded that he has been prime minister for just a month, and pointed to moves he made to reverse some of Trudeau’s policies, such as scrapping the carbon tax on consumer fuels. As for inflation, Carney noted that it was well under control when he was governor of the Bank of Canada. “I know it may be difficult, Mr. Poilievre,” Carney told him. “You spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax and they’re both gone.” “Well, you’re doing a good impersonation of him, with the same policies,” Poilievre shot back. Trudeau announced in January that he was stepping down as prime minister and Carney was sworn in as his replacement on March 14. He triggered an election nine days later. “The question you have

Gunvor, Adnoc Shortlisted for Shell South Africa Unit

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and Swiss commodities trading firm Gunvor are among companies that have been shortlisted to buy Shell Plc’s downstream assets in South Africa, according to people familiar with the matter. The two companies are strong contenders for the assets that are valued at about $1 billion, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is private. Previous potential bidders including Trafigura’s Puma Energy, Sasol Ltd. and South Africa’s PetroSA are no longer in the running, two of the people said. “While Adnoc Distribution regularly reviews opportunities for domestic and international growth, we don’t comment on market speculation,” Adnoc’s fuel retail unit said. Shell, Gunvor, Trafigura and Sasol declined to comment. PetroSA did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Shell has been looking to offload the assets, which include about 600 fuel stations and trading operations in Africa’s biggest economy, as part of a broader strategy to focus on regions and businesses that offer higher returns. The assets are attractive for trading firms since they ensure demand for fuels that they can then supply. Adnoc and other Middle East oil companies such as Saudi Aramco have been expanding their trading arms as they look to break into new markets. Shell is working with adviser Rothschild & Co and a winner could be announced in the coming weeks, the people said. Talks are continuing and there’s no certainty there will be a final sale, they said. Saudi Aramco has also been involved in the process, but it wasn’t immediately clear if it was still in the running, the people said. Aramco declined to comment. A deal would give the buyer about 10% of South Africa’s fuel stations. The market in the country has changed significantly in recent years with trader Glencore Plc acquiring

ICYMI: Trump Administration Adds Two DOE Critical Minerals Projects to Federal Permitting Dashboard

ICYMI— The Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (Permitting Council) today announced increased transparency and accountability for the federal permitting of two Department of Energy (DOE) critical minerals projects. The projects — Michigan Potash and the South West Arkansas Project — are part of the first wave of critical minerals projects added to the Permitting Dashboard in response to President Trump’s Executive Order, Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production. Once completed, both DOE-supported projects will help meet President Trump’s commitment to bolster domestic production of America’s vast mineral resources, support more American jobs and reduce reliance on foreign supply chains. The Michigan Potash Project, supported by DOE’s Loan Programs Office, is projected to produce the largest American-based source of high-quality potash fertilizer and food-grade salt using mechanical vapor recompression technology and geothermal heat from subsurface brine. Once completed, this project will reduce reliance on potash imports, support American farmers, improve food security, and create 200 permanent and 400 construction sector jobs. DOE announced a conditional commitment for a loan guarantee of up to $1.26 billion to Michigan Potash in January 2025. The South West Arkansas Project, under DOE’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains, supports the construction of a world-class Direct Lithium Extraction facility that will produce battery-grade lithium carbonate from lithium-rich brine in North America. Once completed, this project will help secure the domestic lithium supply chain and is expected to create roughly 100 direct long-term jobs and 300 construction sector jobs. These additions to the Federal Permitting Dashboard reflect the Administration’s commitment to strengthen domestic supply chains for critical minerals and materials, reduce dependence on foreign sources, and advance President Trump’s bold agenda for American energy dominance through a more secure, affordable, and reliable U.S. energy system. The Department looks forward to working with federal partners, project

EVOL: Courting wood, grid zombies and Easter wake loss

This week, Wood provided updates on Sidara’s proposed £250 million takeover, NESO declared war on zombies in the grid queue, and Equinor and Orsted warned of the impacts of wake loss. Aberdeen-headquartered Wood received a non-binding takeover bid from Dubai-based rival Sidara worth £250m, a significant drop-off compared to last year’s £1.5 billion bid. Our reporters discuss this, Wood’s shares being suspended and the impacts of yet another Scottish company being bought over by international competitors. Next up, the UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) unveiled plans to get rid of ‘zombies’ from the grid queue in a collaboration with regulator Ofgem. This could see up to 360GW of projects on the current queue have their contracts downgraded because they are not ready. What does this mean, and is it a result of too much dithering from the UK? Finally, European energy giants Equinor and Orsted have said offshore wind revenues could take a £363m hit due to other projects getting in the way of their turbines. Although those in the Tour de France peloton don’t mind the frontrunner taking the brunt of the wind resistance, turbine operators do. Does the industry need to share its survey results so that everyone can benefit from the North Sea breeze? Listen to Energy Voice Out Loud on your podcast platform of choice.

Trump administration moves to curb energy regulation; BLM nominee stands down

The Trump administration issued two policy directives Apr. 10 to curb energy regulations, the same day the president’s choice to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) pulled her nomination. Kathleen Sgamma, former head of Western Energy Alliance (WEA), an oil and gas trade association, withdrew her nomination after a memo was leaked on X that included critical remarks following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. In the memo to WEA executives, Sgamma said she was “disgusted” by Trump “spreading misinformation” on Jan. 6 and “dishonoring the vote of the people.” The Senate was to conduct a confirmation hearing Apr. 10. Prior to her withdrawal, industry had praised the choice of Sgamma to head the agency that determines the rules for oil and gas operations on federal lands. Deregulation On the deregulation front, the Interior Department said it would no longer require BLM to prepare environmental impact statements (EIS) for about 3,244 oil and gas leases in seven western states. The move comes in response to two executive orders by President Donald Trump in January to increase US oil and gas production “by reducing regulatory barriers for oil and gas companies” and expediting development permits, Interior noted (OGJ Online, Jan. 21, 2025). Under the policy, BLM would no longer have to prepare an EIS for oil and gas leasing decisions on about 3.5 million acres across Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. BLM currently manages over 23 million acres of federal land leased for oil and gas development. The agency said it will look for ways to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1970 law that requires federal agencies to assess the potential environmental impacts of their proposed actions. In recent years, courts have increasingly delayed lease sales and projects,

The Rise of AI Factories: Transforming Intelligence at Scale

AI Factories Redefine Infrastructure The architecture of AI factories reflects a paradigm shift that mirrors the evolution of the industrial age itself—from manual processes to automation, and now to autonomous intelligence. Nvidia’s framing of these systems as “factories” isn’t just branding; it’s a conceptual leap that positions AI infrastructure as the new production line. GPUs are the engines, data is the raw material, and the output isn’t a physical product, but predictive power at unprecedented scale. In this vision, compute capacity becomes a strategic asset, and the ability to iterate faster on AI models becomes a competitive differentiator, not just a technical milestone. This evolution also introduces a new calculus for data center investment. The cost-per-token of inference—how efficiently a system can produce usable AI output—emerges as a critical KPI, replacing traditional metrics like PUE or rack density as primary indicators of performance. That changes the game for developers, operators, and regulators alike. Just as cloud computing shifted the industry’s center of gravity over the past decade, the rise of AI factories is likely to redraw the map again—favoring locations with not only robust power and cooling, but with access to clean energy, proximity to data-rich ecosystems, and incentives that align with national digital strategies. The Economics of AI: Scaling Laws and Compute Demand At the heart of the AI factory model is a requirement for a deep understanding of the scaling laws that govern AI economics. Initially, the emphasis in AI revolved around pretraining large models, requiring massive amounts of compute, expert labor, and curated data. Over five years, pretraining compute needs have increased by a factor of 50 million. However, once a foundational model is trained, the downstream potential multiplies exponentially, while the compute required to utilize a fully trained model for standard inference is significantly less than

Google’s AI-Powered Grid Revolution: How Data Centers Are Reshaping the U.S. Power Landscape

Google Unveils Groundbreaking AI Partnership with PJM and Tapestry to Reinvent the U.S. Power Grid In a move that underscores the growing intersection between digital infrastructure and energy resilience, Google has announced a major new initiative to modernize the U.S. electric grid using artificial intelligence. The company is partnering with PJM Interconnection—the largest grid operator in North America—and Tapestry, an Alphabet moonshot backed by Google Cloud and DeepMind, to develop AI tools aimed at transforming how new power sources are brought online. The initiative, detailed in a blog post by Alphabet and Google President Ruth Porat, represents one of Google’s most ambitious energy collaborations to date. It seeks to address mounting challenges facing grid operators, particularly the explosive backlog of energy generation projects that await interconnection in a power system unprepared for 21st-century demands. “This is our biggest step yet to use AI for building a stronger, more resilient electricity system,” Porat wrote. Tapping AI to Tackle an Interconnection Crisis The timing is critical. The U.S. energy grid is facing a historic inflection point. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, more than 2,600 gigawatts (GW) of generation and storage projects were waiting in interconnection queues at the end of 2023—more than double the total installed capacity of the entire U.S. grid. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has revised its five-year demand forecast, now projecting U.S. peak load to rise by 128 GW before 2030—more than triple the previous estimate. Grid operators like PJM are straining to process a surge in interconnection requests, which have skyrocketed from a few dozen to thousands annually. This wave of applications has exposed the limits of legacy systems and planning tools. Enter AI. Tapestry’s role is to develop and deploy AI models that can intelligently manage and streamline the complex process of

Podcast: Vaire Computing Bets on Reversible Logic for ‘Near Zero Energy’ AI Data Centers

The AI revolution is charging ahead—but powering it shouldn’t cost us the planet. That tension lies at the heart of Vaire Computing’s bold proposition: rethinking the very logic that underpins silicon to make chips radically more energy efficient. Speaking on the Data Center Frontier Show podcast, Vaire CEO Rodolfo Rossini laid out a compelling case for why the next era of compute won’t just be about scaling transistors—but reinventing the way they work. “Moore’s Law is coming to an end, at least for classical CMOS,” Rossini said. “There are a number of potential architectures out there—quantum and photonics are the most well known. Our bet is that the future will look a lot like existing CMOS, but the logic will look very, very, very different.” That bet is reversible computing—a largely untapped architecture that promises major gains in energy efficiency by recovering energy lost during computation. A Forgotten Frontier Unlike conventional chips that discard energy with each logic operation, reversible chips can theoretically recycle that energy. The concept, Rossini explained, isn’t new—but it’s long been overlooked. “The tech is really old. I mean really old,” Rossini said. “The seeds of this technology were actually at the very beginning of the industrial revolution.” Drawing on the work of 19th-century mechanical engineers like Sadi Carnot and later insights from John von Neumann, the theoretical underpinnings of reversible computing stretch back decades. A pivotal 1961 paper formally connected reversibility to energy efficiency in computing. But progress stalled—until now. “Nothing really happened until a team of MIT students built the first chip in the 1990s,” Rossini noted. “But they were trying to build a CPU, which is a world of pain. There’s a reason why I don’t think there’s been a startup trying to build CPUs for a very, very long time.” AI, the

Pennsylvania’s Homer City Energy Campus: A Brownfield Transformed for Data Center Innovation

The redevelopment of the Homer City Generating Station in Pennsylvania represents an important transformation from a decommissioned coal-fired power plant to a state-of-the-art natural gas-powered data center campus, showing the creative reuse of a large brownfield site and the creation of what can be a significant location in power generation and the digital future. The redevelopment will address the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing technologies, while also contributing to Pennsylvania’s digital advancement, in an area not known as a hotbed of technical prowess. Brownfield Development Established in 1969, the original generating station was a 2-gigawatt coal-fired power plant located near Homer City, Indiana County, Pennsylvania. The site was formerly the largest coal-burning power plant in the state, and known for its 1,217-foot chimney, the tallest in the United States. In April 2023, the owners announced its closure due to competition from cheaper natural gas and the rising costs of environmental compliance. The plant was officially decommissioned on July 1, 2023, and its demolition, including the iconic chimney, was completed by March 22, 2025. The redevelopment project, led by Homer City Redevelopment (HCR) in partnership with Kiewit Power Constructors Co., plans to transform the 3,200-acre site into the Homer City Energy Campus, via construction of a 4.5-gigawatt natural gas-fired power plant, making it the largest of its kind in the United States. Gas Turbines This plant will utilize seven high-efficiency, hydrogen-enabled 7HA.02 gas turbines supplied by GE Vernova, with deliveries expected to begin in 2026. The GE Vernova gas turbine has been seeing significant interest in the power generation market as new power plants have been moving to the planning stage. The GE Vernova 7HA.02 is a high-efficiency, hydrogen-enabled gas turbine designed for advanced power generation applications. As part of GE Vernova’s HA product line, it

Dell data center modernization gear targets AI, HPC workloads

The update starts with new PowerEdge R470, R570, R670 and R770 servers featuring Intel Xeon 6 with P-cores processors in single- and dual-socket configurations designed to handle high-performance computing, virtualization, analytics and artificial intelligence inferencing. Dell said they save up to half of the energy costs of previous server generations while supporting up to 50% more cores per processors and 67% better performance. With the R770, up to 80% of space can be saved and a 42U rack. They feature the Dell Modular Hardware System architecture, which is based on Open Compute Project standards. The controller system also received a significant update, with improvements to Dell OpenManage and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller providing real-time monitoring, while the Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller for PCIe Gen 5 hardware reduces write latency up to 33-fold.

Intel sells off majority stake in its FPGA business

Altera will continue offering field-programmable gate array (FPGA) products across a wide range of use cases, including automotive, communications, data centers, embedded systems, industrial, and aerospace. “People were a bit surprised at Intel’s sale of the majority stake in Altera, but they shouldn’t have been. Lip-Bu indicated that shoring up Intel’s balance sheet was important,” said Jim McGregor, chief analyst with Tirias Research. The Altera has been in the works for a while and is a relic of past mistakes by Intel to try to acquire its way into AI, whether it was through FPGAs or other accelerators like Habana or Nervana, note Anshel Sag, principal analyst with Moor Insight and Research. “Ultimately, the 50% haircut on the valuation of Altera is unfortunate, but again is a demonstration of Intel’s past mistakes. I do believe that finishing the process of spinning it out does give Intel back some capital and narrows the company’s focus,” he said. So where did it go wrong? It wasn’t with FPGAs because AMD is making a good run of it with its Xilinx acquisition. The fault, analysts say, lies with Intel, which has a terrible track record when it comes to acquisitions. “Altera could have been a great asset to Intel, just as Xilinx has become a valuable asset to AMD. However, like most of its acquisitions, Intel did not manage Altera well,” said McGregor.

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

Stay Ahead, Stay ONMINE