Sea levels are rising faster than at any point in human history, and for every foot that waters rise, 100 million people lose their homes. At current projections, that means about 300 million people will be forced to move in the decades to come, along with the social and political conflict as people migrate inland. Despite this looming crisis, the world still lacks specific, reliable forecasts for when and where the seas will rise – and we have invested almost nothing in understanding whether and how we can slow it down.
Societies must continue to focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s increasingly clear that the world needs to do more: we need to predict the future of the world’s ice with precision, and to explore safe, science-backed methods to keep it from melting away.
What does that look like? A growing group of scientists at universities and non-profits are testing a new approach, one that treats ice not as a distant, untouchable force, but as a system we can understand, anticipate and conserve.
The challenge is vast. The largest drivers of sea-level rise are ocean-bound glaciers whose loss is largely driven by warm ocean currents melting their undersides, a deep ocean process that will continue even as we reduce emissions. Like enormous ice cubes dumped into a glass of water, collapsing glaciers can raise sea levels precipitously.
Most concerning is the Florida-sized Thwaites glacier in west Antarctica, called the “doomsday glacier” because it is the keystone holding back the much larger west Antarctic ice sheet. If, as satellite observations indicate, Thwaites continues to collapse, the west Antarctic ice sheet would go with it, raising global sea levels more than 6ft, displacing more than half a billion people, in our children’s lifetimes. Notably, while we believe reducing carbon emissions is critical for climate resilience, even bringing emissions to preindustrial levels will not slow this collapse.
This scenario is daunting, but we are not powerless. The way we see it, there has never been a better time to meet this challenge head-on. We are the beneficiaries of decades of polar and glacier research strengthened by innovative technologies that allow us to monitor the ice sheets, study relevant phenomena in the laboratory and combine this knowledge in computational models to forecast sea-level rise.
Technologies we can bring to bear include satellite-based radar, solar-powered drones, robot submarines, lab-based “artificial glaciers” and advanced computing technologies, including artificial intelligence.
What might be possible in the future to prevent sea-level rise? Glaciers, which flow like rivers of ice over a bed of rock and sediment, can naturally freeze themselves to their beds under the right conditions, as the Kamb ice stream in west Antarctica did about 200 years ago. This freezing occurred in only a few relatively small areas under Kamb, and yet the entire glacier has virtually stopped flowing and is currently accumulating ice.
We cannot afford to debate until the tide is at our door
Importantly, this freezing-induced stabilization, which has lasted for centuries, did not affect the stability of surrounding areas, suggesting there are nature-inspired solutions that could stabilize Thwaites, and other areas, at reasonable cost and risk, especially compared with the astronomical costs and existential risks of unchecked sea-level rise. One approach that shows promise would involve drilling to the bed of Thwaites and installing passive heat pumps, known as thermosiphons, to cool its base.
These are only ideas at this stage. It will take years of research and development to understand if and how we might stabilize ice sheets. Such efforts will need to consider the views of multiple governing bodies and stakeholders and follow established engineering frameworks, including Nasa’s Technology Readiness Level (TRL) system, which assesses viability throughout a deliberative development process. Innovation and speed are of the essence because of the human and economic toll of sea-level rise, but so too are scientific discipline and environmental responsibility.
We cannot “move fast and break things” – but we also cannot afford to debate until the tide is at our door.
Philanthropy is currently picking up where governments have failed to fund at scale. For example, the recently concluded International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a partnership between the US and the UK, provided on average about US$7m each year from 2018 to 2025. That is considered a major investment in this field, yet it is vanishingly small next to the hundreds of billions lost to coastal flooding every year. Accelerating preparations for sea level rise requires greater and sustained funding commitments.
As scientists who have studied ice sheets and glaciers for years, we were resigned to documenting their demise. But we’ve decided to embrace a more proactive approach to this problem, which means applying our knowledge and skills to rapidly improve sea-level forecasts, so we all know what’s coming and when, and, in parallel, to research and develop solutions that could slow rates of sea-level rise.
All of us must face the fact that sea levels will continue to rise, with major implications for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. However, facing that reality is not the same as accepting it. We must start now to combine emissions reduction with careful, responsible exploration of new options to slow sea-level rise and prevent worst-case scenarios.
If we fail to find new options, we will at least know that we did everything we could, while helping humanity prepare for what’s coming. And if we succeed, we will have done something once thought out of reach: we’ll have preserved the world’s coastlines, and given future generations the chance to live by stable seas.
Dr Brent Minchew is the co-founder and chief scientist at the Arête Glacier Initiative and a professor of geophysics at Caltech
Dr Colin Meyer is the co-founder and deputy scientist at the Arête Glacier Initiative and an associate professor of engineering at Dartmouth College
