Ice on the rocks: Attempts to save glaciers hit ethical walls

When you see something you love hurting, you want to help.

Leslie Field was hiking to Glacier National Park’s Grinnell Glacier in 2016 when the ranger leading the hike told them that that year, nearby Gem glacier had been officially demoted to a permanent snowfield — it was no longer moving and therefore no longer a glacier. A combination of warming temperatures, sun-absorbing soot and diminishing snowfalls was driving the park’s ice fields to extinction.

“It got me thinking hard about what I could do,” Field said. “I’m an inventor. Since 2006, I’ve been looking at reflective ice disappearance. What kind of reflective material might be safe enough to regain that reflectivity?”

The shrinkage of the glaciers caught many observers by surprise. As the 2017 USGS report noted, “Once warming temperatures initiated accelerated ice melt, these small glaciers first lost thickness and volume without their footprint changing significantly. As these small glaciers became thinner, the continued ice melt caused them to retreat from the edge of the bench. Therefore, the relatively minimal reduction in areas for these small glaciers between a period like 1998 and 2005 does not necessarily indicate that there was little loss of ice.”

Bright Ice Initiative founder Leslie Field, seen here exploring a glacier in Iceland in 2017, has proposed using microscopic balls of glass to insulate polar ice packs and mountain glaciers as a way of slowing their meltdown.

For example, Grinnell Glacier in that period saw its boundary margin shrink about 5.6%. But its ice volume — the amount of frozen water grinding around in its basin, is just 10% of what it was in 1850. Photographs taken from the summit of Mount Gould in 1938 show the entire cirque filled with ice. The same shot taken in 1981 shows the appearance of Upper Grinnell Lake, taking about a third of the cirque basin. In 1988, the lake fills more than half the space. An image from the same spot in 2005 has the milky blue waters of Upper Grinnell Lake covering most of the bowl, with just a thin ledge of ice jutting out of the southern rim.

In other words, someone who saw Grinnell Glacier as a child in the 1980s experienced it changing from ice to lake by the time they got out of college.

With a doctorate degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkley and a master's degree in chemical engineering from MIT, Field got interested in ice preservation in 2006. She incorporated a nonprofit organization called Ice911 Research, which was later renamed the Arctic Ice Project. Its mission was to evaluate ideas for increasing reflectivity on ice. She thought sea ice would be the place to start.

Icebergs float on the small lake now filling most of Grinnell Glacier's basin below Mount Gould. As late as the mid-20th century, Salamander Glacier in the upper left was still attached to Grinnell before global warming made them separate ice fields.

In 2022, the Arctic was warming four times faster than the planet as a whole. As the pack ice surrounding the North Pole melts, it exposes the sea. Open water has a much lower albedo (ability to reflect light) than ice, and so absorbs more heat from sunshine. That warms the water, melting more ice, which exposes more water, and we have a shampoo-bottle feedback loop — rinse/repeat ad infinitum.

Arctic Ice Project developed a plan to spread microscopic glass balls like dust over arctic ice flows. The shiny microspheres reflect almost as much sunlight as pure snow, and considerably more than ice, which is darker than snow. That insulates the ice and slows its decay.

The glass spheres measure about 60 microns in diameter and have more than 20 existing commercial uses, including binders and fillers for cosmetics and medicines. Made mostly of silicon, they are far more chemically inert than similar plastic materials. They’re hydrophilic, so they stick to water and ice.

“The shift in albedo between open ocean and multi-year sea ice is substantial,” Field said. If you’re thinking about leverage, all of this is about leverage. That could be key.”

To gain support, the proposal had to predict a measurable difference in global warming. Initial modeling results indicated that if applied across 19,000 square miles of arctic ice flows, the microspheres could retard impacts of polar warming by up to 15 years. That could stabilize polar vortex outbreaks that send freak blizzards deep into Texas, maintain the speed of Gulf Stream currents that control European weather, and decelerate sea level rise threatening coastal cities.

Field and her crew selected a small pond in Alaska as a test site. They got permission from the Alaska Native Corporation leadership in the area — the Alaskan version of an Indian Reservation. Tests on pond ice in 2021 reported a 27% decrease in melting when the glass layer was applied at a half-millimeter thickness. That results in treated ice remaining present a month to six weeks longer than untreated ice. Aerial photos of the test showed a distinct checkerboard effect. Untreated portions soon showed dark water below. Dusted regions remained bright white.

Field also wanted a solution that had a different risk profile than more publicized geoengineering ideas that proposed changing the entire planet’s atmosphere. She didn’t want to work on something “with no undo switch.”

That’s the challenge for more well-publicized geoengineering endeavors such as solar radiation modification. SRM involves spraying reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere to block 1-2% of the sunlight reaching Earth. That might mimic the effect of volcanic eruptions. The 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption released 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the global atmosphere, and reduced global temperatures by half a degree C for the next two years.

Last winter, a team of Harvard University researchers planned a proof-of-concept test using a high-altitude balloon to release a half-mile-long cloud calcium carbonate dust 12 miles above Sweden. The balloon would then drift back through the cloud with a load of sensors recording how well the dust mixed in the general atmosphere. Protests from Indigenous groups resulted in the experiment’s cancellation.

The Arctic Ice Project hit similar opposition. Field said she collided with the old scientific aphorism: In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.

In AIP's case, the project’s initial models looked at how the treatment would work at global scale. That led some people to assume she was launching a project of planetary scope.

“That first paper that we put out in 2018 made a big splash about what we could do,” Field said. “But I think people got the wrong idea abut the scale of our research work. Modelers needed to model global applications to show a strong signal that this would do something. It was a radical idea I was putting forth, and that’s where fear comes in. I didn’t understand how worried people were.”

In April 2022, a coalition of 12 Alaskan tribes and 25 additional Indigenous organizations published a protest to the project, questioning the safety of the glass material and denouncing what they considered a failure to fully consult with the local Native community leaders before beginning experiments.

Objections came from organizations such as the Indigenous Environmental Network, a three-decade-old group focused on environmental justice and tribal sovereignty issues. In May 2022, it blasted the experiment as “greenwashed disaster capitalism,” and launched a petition drive objecting to testing plans in Utqiagvik, Alaska, that it claimed were started “without any tribal government consultation, and without free prior and informed consent of the Indigenous peoples who are directly impacted.”

“What I didn’t do — what I didn’t understand — was I didn’t bother to summon people to a lot of extra meetings,” Field said. “But that’s what the community would have liked. There was a need to consult with tribal elders, because a lot of the corporation leadership was seen as in the pockets of oil companies. I should have done more outreach. There’s a deep suspicion of people with accents like mine who come from the Lower 48.

“My intention was always to start local. But people were reading this and saying ‘Hey, she’s going to cover the Arctic with billions of glass beads. The approach has always been meant to be localized, to have the lightest touch on the environment possible, to have the least risk, while providing benefit in key selected areas. My guiding principle was and still is 'First do no harm.'”

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey have to resort to boats to study the foot of Grinnell Glacier, which has a large meltwater lake submerging its leading edge.

A disappearing glacier is a climatologist’s canary in the coal mine. It’s the inconvenient truth, to use Vice President Al Gore’s documentary title phrase, verifying our culpability for global warming. Gore used a hike to Grinnell Glacier in 1997 to “strike a symbolic blow against global warming,” in the words of Washington Post reporter Jo Warrick. Future tourists, Gore warned, would have to settle for “the park formerly known as Glacier.”

That was five years after President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio De Janeiro Earth Summit. It was two months before 150 nations signed the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and President Bill Clinton’s administration launched a strategy to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Warrick presciently observed that “if the plan stalls — or worse — if it drives up energy prices and weakens the economy, Gore’s presidential prospects could go the way of the glaciers.” Two years later, Gore lost his presidential bid to George W. Bush, who made his fortune in the Texas oil fields.

When people like George Bird Grinnell started lobbying Congress to make Glacier into a national park in the 19th century, the area had 146 small mountain glaciers. That was the peak of the Little Ice Age, when Grinnell’s self-named glacier covered almost 2 square kilometers.

When comprehensive maps were made in 1966, it had shrunk by half. In a 2015 survey, Grinnell covered 0.56 square kilometers, losing nearly half its expanse again and 71% of its area since George Grinnell’s time.

By 2005, the number of Glacier Park ice fields still moving and larger than 100,000 square meters was down to 32. By 2015 — the latest comprehensive area survey — the total shrank to 26. Popular predictions presumed they would all be gone by 2030.

No one is proposing a geoengineering experiment to save ice in Glacier National Park. But should Grinnell Glacier disappear, so what? How might we measure the loss?

Glaciers perform some immediate ecological functions. They bank cold water in summer that modulates stream temperature, on which several Glacier Park insect and fish species depend. They offer heat refuges for large mammals such as mountain goats and grizzly bears. The glacial till released in their runoff limits the ecological performance of receiving lakes, benefiting some hardy species at the expense of those needing clearer water.

“I would say glaciers are a cultural resource — that’s where the presence or absence is really impactful,” said Caitlyn Florentine, the principal investigator for the USGS Benchmark Glacier Project in Glacier National Park. “We’re thinking of glaciers as dynamic landforms, sensitive indicators of what’s happening with climates over centuries and eons. It’s an intriguing question to contemplate the nature of landscapes today relative to 10,000 years ago. And the ability to project the fate of glaciers on the planet, how they respond to climate warming, that’s very important to understand.”

The Meltwater Stonefly (Lednia tumana) depends on glacial meltwater to cool its high-altitude stream habitat. Loss of glacial ice in places like Glacier National Park threaten links in the food chain as the climate warms.

The Arctic isn’t like Las Vegas — what happens there doesn’t stay there.

Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, Arctic ice coverage has gone down 40%. Mountain glacier fields around the globe have melted away 6 trillion tons of ice. The icebound island of Greenland alone has lost 4 trillion tons. That has warped historic weather patterns, raising heat domes over British Columbia and India. The International Panel on Climate Change estimates that under current melting tempos, we’re likely to see long-term ocean levels rise higher than a four-story building.

As Harvard University Center for the Environment Director Dan Schrag put it, “Even if we could become carbon-neutral tomorrow, the climate will keep changing for thousands of years, the ice sheets will keep melting, and the seas will continue to rise.”

That raises the challenges of what’s worth doing, and who should do it. Those are separate problems.

Even before scientific studies validate geoengineering ideas, the whole concept has to win public acceptance. Like inventing nuclear bombs or tinkering with human genetics, the experiments could produce unanticipated consequences.

University of Montana Philosophy and Ethics Professor Christopher Preston has been studying the challenges of geoengineering for more than a decade. In 2012, he published a list of problems ranging from the taboo about researching it at all to what happens if a rogue individual actually tries something.

“Once the taboo against intentional climate modification had been broken, it seems probable that there would be a slippery slope toward ‘designer climates’ where the whole idea of restoring a ‘natural’ climate had been abandoned entirely,” Preston wrote. “(Some researchers) enthusiastically embrace this hope, stating ‘creating the future will mean going beyond fears of transgressing natural limits and nostalgic hopes of returning to some pastoral or pristine era.”

Mount Gould looms over Salamander and Grinnell glaciers in Glacier National Park, as seen from an overlook on the Garden Wall.

Despite the protocols and pledges governments made at Rio and Kyoto and last month in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, carbon dioxide levels have risen unabated. We released about 9 billion metric tons of CO2 a year in 1960. Now we’re pumping out about 35 billion metric tons annually. That rate of increase is 100 times greater than any period in the Earth’s geological history.

This brings up the “Greenfinger Scenario” — the only-half-joking worry that a private billionaire will independently activate some climate-change technology, like the James Bond villain Auric Goldfinger. With Elon Musk already encircling the globe with his Starlink satellites, launched by his own fleet of rockets, the idea of a nongovernmental entity taking rogue action is far from far-fetched.

The cost-effectiveness of geoengineering actually makes Greenfinger more probable. Harvard studies found the cost of limiting greenhouse gas emissions enough to restrain global warming below 2 degrees C by 2050 would cost $2 trillion a year in global public spending. That doesn’t count the $300 billion a year needed to adapt to rising sea levels and other climate-driven threats already underway.

In contrast, existing proposals to limit global warming to 2 degrees C by solar radiation management pencil out at around $5 billion a year. That’s led analysts at Harvard to speculate SRM “could be deployed by a very small number of nations without a consultative global process — by the G-7 nations for example, or by the United States alongside China or India. At the moment … nothing in U.S. or international law would prevent such a deployment.”

Geoengineering also raises moral hazard questions. Moral hazard is what philosophers and insurance agents call an action that lets the actor disregard consequences because they don’t have to pay for them. In the case of geoengineering, preserving ice or reflecting sunlight may cool the planet, but it does nothing to confront what’s warming the planet — our own production of greenhouse gases that trap more heat within our atmosphere. It’s like gambling with house money in Vegas — who cares if you lose?

Yet even Preston acknowledges talking about geoengineering might have the beneficial effect of encouraging more people to fight global warming — if only as a way to head off the geoengineering they think might be worse. But he also worries about the sheer inertia of hopelessness in the face of global catastrophe: “Rather than battle this perfect storm, it has proven much simpler to find excuses for continuing with business as usual, a failure to which certain vested interests in the wealthy nations have clearly succumbed.”

The geoengineering field teems with tradeoffs. Global warming has already visibly slowed ocean currents, altered the development of hurricanes and transformed cropland into desert. The fossil fuel industry underpins virtually all of modern society with gas in cars, heat in winter, air conditioning in heat waves, and a financial web of trillions of dollars paying for comfort and stability worldwide.

Successfully stalling global temperature rise could also stall investment and policy shifts toward non-polluting energy alternatives like wind and solar.

Some quarters actually welcome a warmer planet. Russia has stated interest in an ice-free Arctic, which it sees as a boon to its transcontinental shipping needs. It also has outstanding oil and gas development claims in Arctic waters that would be simplified if the Arctic ice melts.

Glass microspheres measuring 60 microns in diameter might be able to slow the melting of polar ice caps or mountain glaciers when applied like dust on the surface. However, their potential use has triggered protests from Indigenous groups concerned about environmental damage and lack of transparency.

Which brings us back to ice.

After the protests over the Alaska test attempt, Field stepped away from AIP in January. AIP’s chief scientist Steve Zornetzer said the idea of trying to protect arctic ice remains vital.

“With respect to what we’re doing with surface albedo, I think the moral hazard question is a hollow argument,” Zornetzer said. ‘If we were on track to decarbonize within the next 20 years, I would put more credence in the moral hazard argument. But humanity is not on track. It’s woefully negligent in fulfilling its promises. We’re way behind the power curve. So if we can create a tool that can slow down the rate of global warming, it buys humanity time to come to its senses and implement rational approaches.

A neurobiologist, Zornetzer was the associate director of the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and director of biomedical science in the Office of Naval Research in Washington, D.C. before retiring in 2018. He currently lives in Sunnyvale, California, north of San Jose and the Silicon Valley tech center.

“I got interested in climate change issues because I saw it as the existential issue of our time,” said Zornetzer. “I was looking for ways to get engaged in this, and I knew of Dr. Field’s early work. Someone put me in touch with her, and I got involved on a pro-bono basis.”

The glass microsphere project has advantages that solar geoengineering proposals lack. Concepts like whitening the atmosphere with sulphate dust or seeding clouds to modify rainfall have the potential for much larger unintended consequences. Similar SRM proposals have met objections ranging from increasing malaria rates in Bangladesh to accelerating dust storms in the Middle East and destabilizing rainfall in South America’s La Plata river basin.

“This is clearly limited,” Zornetzer said of the glass microspheres. “It can be cleaned up if it had to be. Once something’s in the atmosphere, it can’t be cleaned up. I’m pretty comfortable with proceeding with this. I’m less comfortable with other forms of geoengineering until a sufficient amount of research has been completed and published.”

Preliminary tests have looked for toxic effects on organisms in the Arctic life chain such as worms in the sediment floor of the sea. They’ve also examined impacts to zooplankton and shrimp and crustaceans and the fish that feed on those shrimp.

“The last thing we want to do is create a situation that’s harmful to the environment,” Zornetzer said. “We’re trying to restore the environment they used to have. I call it climate restoration. We’re trying to restore a climate that’s existed there for thousands of years. If we can take steps that would restore the climate as it used to exist, it would be to everyone’s benefit.”

The material AIP uses costs about $10 a kilo. The precise amounts haven’t been determined yet, but Zornetzer’s back-of-the-napkin calculations envision “a few hundred pounds per square kilometer” would be needed to retard ice melt.

“You could blow it off your hand, but it doesn’t float in the air. It’s not like talcum powder or something that’s easily inhaled.”

The method is currently going through “what-if” testing at a lab in Norway. One big question is finding the ideal time to apply the microspheres. Is it better in mid-summer, when the previous season’s snowcover is gone and the material would be closest to the ice surface? Or later in fall, when temperatures are shifting and new ice is beginning to form?

Arctic ice accumulates from the bottom up, so a fall treatment then might encourage greater accumulation. But that’s also when the arctic weather gets harsher and windier, making application of a dusty substance difficult.

And how, exactly, should it be applied? Spread by a tanker plane like fire retardant? Scattered a few feet above the surface, like fertilizer from a farm tractor? Such tractors might be too heavy to travel on pack ice. Drones might not be strong enough to carry a cost-effective payload. Hovercraft might work, if they can function in sub-zero temperatures.

“We’d prefer distributing by air,” Zornetzer said. “Ships burn fossil fuels, which is putting more carbon in the atmosphere and black carbon on the snow that accelerates melting — which is the opposite effect of what we’re after. In an ideal world, we’d use a blimp with electric motors.”

AIP’s current five-year plan anticipates testing in arctic waters could commence in 2025 or 2026, on ice patches 5 to 10 square kilometers large. The organization has commitments not to move forward before its processes have a proven safety record, and intellectual property and patent protections that describe what the method is and how it must be used to avoid accidents. The safety and methodology guidelines will get published and peer-reviewed in mainstream scientific journals.

Once those are in place, Zornetzer said, it should be available for anyone to use.

“We’re very aware of Indigenous people’s concerns, and they’re justified,” Zornetzer said. “We want to address those head-on, and be able to work with the tribes and individuals that are concerned about this.

“We don’t want this to be adversarial, and to some folks, it is adversarial. If we can be transparent and gain their trust, we can show what we’re doing is not harmful. We’re spending time and money to convince people that this is not harmful, that it won’t hurt the food supply or hurt them if they ingest it. We’re trying to reach out and engage with folks in the Arctic who have a clear stake in what we’re doing.”

Coatings of grit and soot absorb more sunlight on ice fields, causing them to melt faster. Mountain glaciers worldwide have lost more than 6 trillion tons of ice since 1992.

Shortly after stepping away from Arctic Ice Project, Field got asked to discuss her microsphere ideas at what’s often called the Third Pole — the Himalayas.

In India, changes in monsoon patterns threaten a third of the world’s food supply. Pakistan last summer saw flooding that damaged nearly a third of the nation’s infrastructure. Heat waves made outdoor activity nearly impossible for months. More than 5,000 mountain lakes are held back by glacial moraines at risk of outburst flooding, putting the livelihoods and lives of 220 million people in danger.

“I met with some Healthy Climate Initiative people who were looking at ice melt in the Himalayas,” Field said. “They concluded we have one of the most viable ice-preserving solution out there. They wanted to know — can you make it work on glaciers?”

From Glacier National Park, to what she hopes will soon be the Himalayas, Field hopes microscopic glass balls will help slow glacier melt.

The hope is to travel to the Chhotra Shigri glacier in the Himachal Pradesh mountains of northeast India. There the Himalaya Melt Working Group has been studying the glacier’s steady shrinkage.

“I haven’t been there yet. I’m running up hills trying to build endurance to make it there.”

One technical issue to explore is how microspheres would work on inclined surfaces. Arctic ice is essentially flat. Glaciers slide down mountainsides. A surface coating won’t do much good if it all slips off like a skier on a slope.

“You’ve got to keep your values up-front, so people are willing to listen," Field said. "Let’s say we’re working with one glacial lake outburst event, and it works. Then you have other people who will want to implement it elsewhere. This is the power of getting invited by folks in India. But it’s just one country. In any place that might wish to co-develop solutions for climate challenges – a real dilemma is how to get permissions in time, for the work to be of benefit?

“That’s why I’m so excited to go with Glacial Ice – we’ve been invited there. I’m never going to work where we’re not wanted."

On her 2016 visit to Glacier National Park, Field heard Blackfeet Indian campfire stories, saw grizzly bears wrestling in a pond and watched the International Space Station glide through the stars. But one incident on the way to Grinnell Glacier with her son, Greg, struck her as a metaphor for facing the implacable progress of climate change and global warming.

“I’m really scared of heights,” she recalled. “On the way up to Grinnell, we had guides with us but I’m toward the back of the pack. Here we come, exhausted, and here are these bighorn rams, and they own the trail. Greg tells me ‘Mom — they’re right behind us. We gotta run now!' I’m looking at the steep drop-off, and said Greg, you're officially in charge. Tell me what to do. He says ‘Run!’ They thundered by us and we looked up and we're still alive.”

A look at the four lodges and four chalets of Glacier National Park. How many have you visited?

Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter.

Managing Editor

Forest Service forest plans guide the decision-making process at each national forest. The whole U.S. Forest Service has been undergoing a pla…

The 3.7-magnitude occurred at 6:47 a.m. USGS seismic monitors pinpointed it about halfway between Missoula and Polson.

Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal game wardens found the carcass with its head cut off in the Bison Range’s irrigation canal, along the …

The disagreement over land management, specifically development of more overnight lodging, got laid bare in Missoula Friday.

A wolf infected with toxoplasma gondii is 46 times more likely to become a pack leader than an uninfected wolf.

The Two Medicine and Many Glacier gates will join West Glacier and St. Mary on the advance permit program between July 1 and Sept. 10.

Glacier National Park is reminding visitors that 2023 vehicle reservations become available on Wednesday, Feb. 1.

University of Montana environmental philosophy professor Christopher Preston's new book is called "Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife recoveries that …

About 70% of the 2023 backcountry camping permits will become available for reservation on March 15.

Montana Department of Transportation intends to raise the fences between Helmville Road underpass and the Gold Creek interchange, east of Drummond.

A federal judge rejected claims that illegal road access wasn’t part of the official action, and therefore not necessary to be considered as a…

Two decades ago, the Robert fire in Glacier National Park showed the evolving challenge of wildland firefighting.

Park officials are proposing rate changes for most campsites in 2024.