Building walls on the seafloor could prevent glaciers from melting and sea levels rising due to global warming, scientists say.
Barriers of sand and rock positioned at the base of glaciers would stop ice sheets sliding and collapsing, and prevent warm water from eroding the ice from beneath, according to research published this week in the Cryosphere journal, from the European Geosciences Union.
The audacious idea centers on the construction of “extremely simple structures, merely piles of aggregate on the ocean floor, although more advanced structures could certainly be explored in the future,” said the report’s authors, Michael Wolovick, a researcher at the department of geosciences at Princeton University, and John Moore, professor of climate change at the University of Lapland in Finland.
“While reducing emissions remains the short-term priority for minimizing the effects of climate change, in the long run humanity may need to develop contingency plans to deal with an ice sheet collapse,” they added.
