So, the ice borers were still as simple as showerheads. Slow but effective. In the old days we burned a lot of fuel to get the showerhead’s water hot. Now solar panels helped to power the heaters. The meltwater under the showerheads gets suctioned and pumped out of the hole and reheated and used again, with the excess piped a distance away to freeze somewhere else. To both sides of the Pine Island Glacier are regions of ice moving slowly, so the water could be dumped there. In truth it was such a small volume that where we dumped it didn’t matter. We could have let it go into the ocean, it wouldn’t even have registered there. We could almost have drunk it as our drinking water.
We also began to make use of the microwave energy beamed down to us from the Russian satellites in their almost-polar orbits, to power the pumps and the showerheads when the sun went down. Test whether we could make that work, so we could keep the system going year round.
That first experiment had at least taught us this, that you probably wanted to choose a homogenous block of ice within the flow of the glacier, so that the movement of the glacier wouldn’t deform the hole as we drilled it. We had chosen our site partly for that reason— it was a single block that was forty kilometers long and extended all the way across the glacier. Still 130 kilometers upstream from the ice shelf, and a couple hundred meters above sea level. Perfect.
We had done the calculations as to how many drill holes we needed, and how far apart they should be and so on. It was pretty audacious; suck enough water from the underside of the glacier for the whole block of ice that we were working on to lose its water cushion and crash back down onto bedrock, hopefully with a mighty squeal and maybe a crashing sound, as of tires braking on asphalt followed by car hitting wall. Even if that only happened in our heads, it did seem like it was going to be palpable when it happened.
Slawek’s numbers were holding good. Amount of water lubricating the bottoms of Antarctica’s glaciers roughly sixty cubic kilometers. Not insignificant, a clear cube of ice about four kilometers on a side and the same high, so, half as tall as Everest— yes, a lot of water for humans to pump. But not outside the zone of what we already pump every year.
Still, a lot of water to pump, but that’s for all of Antarctica. Around the circle of the continent, about fifty glaciers dump the majority of the ice now rushing into the sea, with a few being the major contributors. Starting from McMurdo and running clockwise, you need to stick the Skelton, the Mulock, the Beardmore, the Carlyon, the Byrd, the Nimrod, the Lennox, the Ramsey, the Shackleton, the Liv, the Axel-Heiberg, the Amundsen, the Scott, the Leverett, the Reedy, the Horlick Ice Stream, the Van der Veen Ice Stream, the Whillans Ice Stream, the Kamb Ice Stream, the Bindschadler Ice Stream, the MacAyeal Ice Stream, the Echelmeyer Ice Stream, the Hammond Glacier, the Boyd, the Land, the Hull, the deVicq, the Murphy, the Haynes, the Thwaites, and our Pine Island; then around the Peninsula to the Drewry, Evans, Rutford, Institute, Möller, and Foundation ice streams; then the Support Force Glacier, the Blackwall Ice Stream, the Recovery Glacier, the Slessor Glacier, the Bailey Ice Stream, the Stancomb-Wills Glacier, the Vestraumen Glacier, the Jutulstraumen, the Entuziasty, the Borchgrivinkesen, the Shirase, the Rayner, the Beaver, the Wilma, the Robert, the Philippi, the Helen, the Roscoe, the Denman, the other Scott, the Underwood, the Adams, the Vanderford, the Totten (biggest of them all), the Dibble, the Francois, the Mertz, the Ninnis, the Rennick, the Tucker, the Mariner, the Priestly, the Reeves, the David, the Mawson, and the Mackay.
That’s actually seventy-four. So, sixty cubic kilometers sucked out from under seventy-four glaciers. Okay, not so bad!
Especially compared to 3,600 cubic kilometers, right?
So we were melting and casing twenty boreholes into Pine Island Glacier. After that we’d pump up all the water that we could. It didn’t seem so bad! In the same realm as wells up in the world, draining fossil water for farms all over the Ogdalilla and other places set atop irreplaceable groundwater resources. Can be done! Solves all problems!
All right, it doesn’t solve all problems. But let’s not get picky. If sea level rises even a meter, all the beaches in the world are gone, and seaports and coastal infrastructures and salt marshes and you name it. And as Hansen and his team pointed out in their 2016 paper, if the rate of rise doubles every ten years, quickly you are fucked, all the coastal cities of the world devastated, damage in the quadrillions, if you think you can put a price on it. What’s the monetary value of human civilization? Trying to answer that question proves you are a moral and practical idiot. Well, economists make such calculations all the time, but that’s their job, and they think it makes sense. In this case, better just to throw up your hands and say civilization is effectively a fiscal infinity, a human infinity.
Tacking
