Restoring Arctic Albedo Through Rebuilding Ice Reflectivity in the Arctic

The Earth's Arctic ice cover has diminished rapidly. NOAA reported last December that 95% of the most-reflective multi-year ice has disappeared over the past 40 years. The effects of this lost reflectivity in the Arctic is to increase the net energy influx to the Arctic, accelerating heating locally and worldwide, as well as affecting the jet stream, all leading to increasing climate-related impacts on populations and ecosystems worldwide.

Our focus is on developing, refining, testing and monitoring an innovative solution to artificially reboot a restoration of the lost reflectivity in the Arctic, using thin layers of hollow glass microspheres to add reflectivity, to reduce and reverse the increased summer radiative forcing from the Ice-Albedo Feedback Effect. We will report on the modeled results of choosing strategic areas for limited deployment of this restoration method, proposed to be deployed over less than 1% of the area of Arctic sea ice in any given strategic location, as well as our instrumentation and deployment approaches.

Successfully mitigating and adapting to climate change will require high resolution climate models that are configured for investigating the impacts of various interventions. Here we propose a science traceability matrix for characterizing the local impact to the ice of applying albedo changing material to Arctic sea ice and characterizing the local impact to the climate of applying albedo changing material to Arctic sea ice in order to improve those models.

This work has the potential to be the largest single safe lever that could be practically and effectively deployed within the short term to reverse the deleterious impacts resulting from lost Arctic reflectivity, giving the world more of the time needed for the adoption of a low-carbon economy and other needed actions to limit climate impacts as we work towards a sustainable future.