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The submarines would build icebergs by freezing ice pieces of a width of 8 meters.Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha
Running out of ice? Do more.
This is the idea of a new proposal for a submarine that could freeze seawater to create new icebergs. The concept, from a team of Indonesian designers, won second place in an international design competition organized by the Siamese Architects Association.
The goal of the submarine is to replace sea ice with cast iron, inspired by efforts to combat the disappearance of the rainforest by planting trees.
"If we could re-coat more polar surfaces with ice, it would certainly prevent the absorption of heat from the oceans, which would also affect global temperatures," said Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, an architect who directed the Team, in an email. "The ultimate goal is to react [to] the sea level rise with different ways of thinking ".
The proposed submarine for making icebergs, as it might appear in the Arctic.Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha
The melting ice is certainly a problem that deserves a solution: Greenland saw record melting of ice last month and Antarctic ice loses faster than ever before. The Greenland icecap and one of the largest glaciers in the Antarctic are approaching an irreversible melting threshold.
If they collapsed, the rise of the seas would engulf the coastal cities.
A submarine that gives birth to an "ice baby"
According to the design of the team, the ice-making submarine would dive under the surface of the ocean to fill with seawater, then rise to the surface and close the hatch of its well shaped hexagon. The reverse osmosis would then filter the salt out of the water so that it could freeze more quickly.
The submarine would reject the concentrated salt in the sea, while the remaining fresh water would freeze inside a hexagon-shaped cast iron surrounded by turbines to isolate it. cold air.
After one month, the submarine reopened its hatch, sank under the water and released a hexagonal ice block 8 meters wide and one meter deep. width of 4 meters. The ship could then push this "ice baby", as the team calls it in the video below, alongside other icebergs hexagonal to build a layer of ice.
The team calls the process "re-iceberg-ization". An animation video illustrates the process:
But Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, told NBC News that he only saw the submarine idea as one " dressing".
"What are you going to do, extinguish a flotilla of 10,000 submarines?" Serreze said such submarines should be deployed on a very large scale to influence sea level rise.
Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, told NBC that the concept "looked like trying to save the sand castle you built at the beach using a Dixie cup when the tide goes up" .
More sea ice could help indirectly, if it's done right
In order for the sea level to be really lower, the icebergs that the proposed submarine could create would have to land, Serreze said. Indeed, melting sea ice does not contribute directly to sea level rise because ice is already in the ocean, whether it is liquid or solid. The melting of land ice – like glaciers and ice caps – is the real threat.
The ice melts during the heat wave in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, August 1.Caspar Haarloev from the documentary "Into the Ice" via Reuters
Sea ice, however, plays a crucial role because it reflects more sunlight (and its heat).
In the video, the design team says the new sea ice could also help restore polar ecosystems suffering from the loss of ice habitats.
"If the ice formed is sufficiently large and reflective to reflect more sun, and if the overall temperatures have become cooler, the" ice babies "can again be produced as permanent ice in the Arctic," said Kotahatuhaha.
The submarines could also serve as research centers, living spaces and ecotourism poles, the team said.
The submarines proposed for making ice cream could serve as research centers or ecotourism centers.Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha
Persistent questions about an ice submarine
Some details of how an ice-making submarine might materialize are still unclear.
"Who will build them and how much energy is needed, and how are the submarines powered?" Serreze told NBC.
Kotahatuhaha said his team still needed to do more research and call on outside experts to solve these problems, but he wanted the submarine to be a "zero emission vehicle" that harnessed the sun's energy or tides. If the ship were fueled by fossil fuels, it would help raise sea levels by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (The heat trapped by these gases causes melting ice and increasing the volume of ocean waters.)
At the present time, Kotahatuhaha said he hoped to establish collaborations and study the feasibility of the project.
"The biggest challenge is not the research itself, but the investment needed to support the research project," he said.
Geoengineering as a last resort
The submarine such as it would look in action, with people on the scale.Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha
The submarine ice maker is far from the only geoengineering solution to the climate crisis. Scientists and startups have also suggested guns that would project fake snow into Antarctica and a balloon that can pump aerosols into the atmosphere to deflect the sun's rays.
The most common criticism of all these ideas, however, is that they do not address the fundamental problem: the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
"There has been a lot of work on geoengineering and it should continue," Serreze told NBC. "We never want to go in that direction, but if it's a last breath, then try it."
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