Evidence of past WAIS collapse
J GOODWIN
Paul Klinkman
I'll assume that people can't find the website for some reason, so I'll bring the article here, with two sketches.
-Paul Klinkman
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R3. Enhancing winter sea ice formation with seawater pumps
11/22/25 This pump is getting cheaper to produce. It's becoming a pipe roughly 3 meters tall and 10 centimeters in diameter, not a huge carrot shape. The very bottom of the pipe is loaded with steel or lead ballast, and above that most of the pipe is filled with airtight sacks so that the pipe floats vertically in calm wind. The top 2 meters of the pipe will stick above the water line and will probably be painted orange for naval visibility. A tiny wind turbine goes on top. An electric heating wire extends perhaps 10 meters below the bottom of the pipe.
The few inches around the pipe's floatation line is usually allowed to freeze solid. Seawater can flow up the sides of the rest of the pipe. A water pump inside the pipe, about at the floatation line, pumps seawater from an inlet six inches below the floatation line to an outlet six inches above the floatation line. This arrangement hides the functional part of the pump down in the ice, away from the worst effects of midwinter Arctic temperatures.
Once a few inches of new ice has been laid down on top of existing ice, the ice pack sinks a few inches into the ocean. At this point the pipe warms all of its outside and pops free of the ice, rising vertically to the current water level. Through progressive floatations, the pump might keep working until an ice floe sticking 2 meters out of the water and extending 18 meters below the surface has been created.
At near-freezing temperatures, seawater should flow quite a distance away in all directions from a high point 2 meters above the surface. We want to build an extremely wide ice floe with every pump.
The pumps can be placed by drone into half an inch of new ice or into leads in ice floes. I'd expect a five year functional lifespan for a pipe, and pipes that break free of the ice can be tracked and picked up by drone and ship, then refurbished and redeployed.
If one pipe can ice up 1 square kilometer of Arctic ice for perhaps $1000 mass-produced, and if ten million pipes are needed to refreeze the Arctic Ocean, then this project would take $10 billion dollars over each 10 year period. This plan is affordable. The scheme doesn't disturb the Arctic Ocean's naturally anaerobic under-ice ecology, nor does it interfere with ring seals or with polar bears. So, it's affordable, doing nothing is not at all affordable, and it's environmentally rather safe.
100 knot winds can tip the pipes and the ice can freeze the pipes in a tipped position. In the long run the pipes can melt themselves to a somewhat straighter position. Also, if a sailboat can be heeled over 20 degrees, then a pipe can be functional when heeled over in the ice.
(1/3/26) Perhaps each pump can be moved to ten or to one hundred different locations by a drone. The drone would first drop a wind powered pilot hole digger on a new section of ice. Once the new pilot hole has been excavated, the drone moves the pilot hole digger away, then moves a pump that has fully melted loose from its current ice to the new hole. The pump will need some type of handle for gripping, or else the drone will need a circular rubbery clamp that reaches around and below the wind turbine, and then clamps around the upper part of the pipe. Crushing total costs to $1 billion or even $100 million per year makes this project eminently feasible, compared to the costs of having the ocean flood out all of the world's coastal cities.
The carrot, shown above, is an older pipe version. It shows the heating wire hanging below the pump's bottom. The pipe shape happens to be more cost-efficient than the carrot shape.
In the Arctic winter, anywhere below 22 degrees F, freshwater ice crystals will form in the water. The salt brine remaining from the freezing process has now been shown in a Northern Canada study to make its way back down into the ocean through tiny holes that the salt brine cuts through the winter ice pack.
Restoring the Arctic Ocean's original ice pack albedo causes spring and summer sunlight to be reflected back into space, as was always true before the climate crisis started. Right now the sun penetrates deep into the Arctic Ocean and warms methane clathrates sitting on the Arctic Ocean's continental shelves, or else blue Arctic Ocean water adds water vapor to the Arctic atmosphere in summer. Ice is a more reflective albedo than surface snow on the ice. As such, ice creates more freezing on the bottom of the floating ice. We want to prevent this bottom freezing from clogging the flow of seawater into the pump, so we have a heating wire below the pump.
The Arctic is a harsh environment for refueling any device. Fortunately, 100 knot winds aren't completely uncommon in the Arctic, so local wind power is readily available all year at intermittent times.
My albedo-restoring plans are pretty much ecologically benign. For example, my pump apparently doesn't disturb the naturally rather anaerobic under-ice ecology in the Arctic Ocean.
In the carrot sketch, the Arctic carrot has produced an ice block 10 meters deep in the sketch, with 9/10 of the ice being underwater, and the new ice stretches perhaps 20 meters in radius. An electric heating wire extends perhaps 50 meters down, New salt water flows upward around the heating wire until it reaches the bottom of the carrot. From there a wind-powered pump pulls the water up above sea level to be poured onto the top of the current sea ice. The carrot has a heavy steel bottom so that the carror remains vertical in the ocean.
When limestone-infused geothermal hot water emerges from the earth in a spring, often a cascading series of limestone pools are formed. in this case I've drawn a seawater pool forming around the carrot. Farther away from the carrot the new ice slopes downward toward sea level.
My drawing of such a deep ice block emphasizes my device's ability to ground the new ice block onto shallow ocean bottoms hundreds of meters down, as well as the carrot's ability to stay above the ice as it continually lays down new layers of ice. Periodically the carrot's walls heat up so that new seawater infiltrates around the carrot's bottom and then the carrot floats upward as the pack ice sinks downward. A carrot with 5 meters of conical section above the water would optimally stay above the creation of a 50 meter depth of pack ice before the ice swallows the wind blades. I can accept sub-optimal actual results.
The cone-shaped float is designed to pop loose from the ice as more meters of new ice are built on top and as the iceberg sinks into the ocean. 90% of any iceberg stays underwater. The 50 meter deep heating wire dangles. A heating wire also allows seawater to flow up to the bottom of the pump's pipe.
Perhaps one million such devices will cause the entire Arctic Ocean to freeze 15 feet thick, reversing the Arctic Ocean’s melting, and preventing a runaway global methane release. The cost to the world of ameliorating the worst of polar warming would be about $10B/year until we bring atmospheric greenhouse gases back to around 300 ppm.
Environmental impacts are low. In particular, this device does not disturb the typical low-oxygen marine environment under the polar pack ice.
I first suggested this floating pump device on Internet comment forums in the late 1990s. Arizona State University students and faculty should get some credit for taking the first steps to design such a device.
Our market economy has no open market system for perfecting and ramping up such a device. A coalition of industrialized nations would first have to see the device functioning, and then they might fund its deployment. Or, perhaps we only need a couple of mechanical engineers to build a prototype, test it in a barrel or on a pond, save the world and get tenure woo hoo!
Tom Goreau
Dear Paul,
I like your wind driven pump to cool Arctic surface waters!
Right now, Davis Strait, between Greenland and Baffin Island, is about 25 C above average, perfect conditions to unleash a flotilla of icebergs that would normally be frozen in place.
Phil Kithill, I, and others are trying to cool tropical surface waters with wave powered upwellers.
Still waiting for funders to see the light and get cool with new ideas!
Best wishes,
Tom
Thomas J. F. Goreau, PhD
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
Chief Scientist, Biorock Technology Inc., Blue Regeneration SL
Technical Advisor, Blue Guardians Programme, SIDS DOCK
37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
gor...@globalcoral.org
www.globalcoral.org
Phone: (1) 857-523-0807 (leave message)
Books:
Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase
Innovative Methods of Marine Ecosystem Restoration
On the Nature of Things: The Scientific Photography of Fritz Goro
Geotherapy: Regenerating ecosystem services to reverse climate change
No one can change the past, everybody can change the future
It’s much later than we think, especially if we don’t think
Those with their heads in the sand will see the light when global warming and sea level rise wash the beach away
“When you run to the rocks, the rocks will be melting, when you run to the sea, the sea will be boiling”, Peter Tosh, Jamaica’s greatest song writer
“The Earth is not dying, she is being killed” U. Utah Phillips
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J GOODWIN
Hi Tom,
I see a long-term issue with sending the heat on the ocean surface deeper into the ocean. That will only make the depths of the ocean hotter. That heat can damage the ecology in deeper water. Where will storing all of this heat get the planet in the end?
I would generally prefer an Amazon Basin method of cooling most of the ocean's surface. In the Amazon billions of trees transpire vast amounts of water vapor into the lower atmosphere. The process of turning liquid water into water vapor is endothermic, it absorbs solar heat. All of this now humid air gradually re-warms back to the atmosphere's normal temperature. Then, because each mole of water molecules masses only 18 grams (16 grams for the oxygen atom and 1 gram for each of two hydrogen atoms) while dry air is mostly nitrogen and oxygen molecules, about 29 grams per mole of molecules), moist air has less mass than dry air. Great blobs of lighter weight moist air start rising into the sky, pulling up quite a bit of nearby moist surface air in a thermal. The largest masses of air start to condense at higher altitudes, forming thunderhead clouds. The rain condenses and falls, releasing the heat at a seriously high altitude, and the newly released water vapor heat keeps driving the thundercloud further into the stratosphere. At this great altitude much of the now released latent heat now radiates back out into outer space above the lower part of the earth's greenhouse effect. Also, thundercloud mist droplets reflect some of the incoming solar heat directly back into space.
Bottom line, surface temperatures in the Amazon Basin regularly stay wildly cooler than temperatures in the Sahara Desert, where heat has to radiate from near sea level through earth's greenhouse to outer space without this assist. Also, the Amazon Basin picks up 3 meters of rainfall each year and the Sahara Desert gets zero.
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U4d. Mister buoy for deeper water
The name of this device, the mister buoy, is nothing other than descriptive and also a rather memorable wordplay.
A cable attached to an anchor at the sea bottom is connected on its other end to the buoy at sea level. The buoy can function several miles out to sea if needed.
The wind's pull against the cable keeps the entire buoy always facing windward.
The buoy has ballast on the bottom of a float sticking up through the waves.
A solar panel or a wind turbine is attached to the top of the mast. Power needs aren't particularly high.
Batteries are part of the ballast down below. At night and in light winds we may still want to add humidity to the air.
The buoy sprays a curtain of salt water mist, which partially evaporates before drifting back down into the ocean. Trade winds bring the moister air generally toward the shore. As before, the mist pumping system can be shut off in case of a hurricane.
Tom Goreau
Dear Paul and Digest Recipients (whoever you may be),
You’re absolutely right that the heat circulates, so this is only a temporary measure, like solar radiation management, that buys us about 1500 years (at present rates of ocean overturning circulation) to reduce GHG gases to safe pre-industrial levels!
Selective ocean upwelling could also greatly increase export of carbon to enhanced fisheries and producing limestone on floating Biorock reefs to neutralize ocean acidification, while producing large amounts of CO2-free energy with Thermogravimetric Engineering,
I’m fully with you on increasing Amazonian transpiration cooling. In the early 1980s I measured the effects on soil and air temperature in virgin Amazonian jungles and in clearcuts, which were MUCH hotter and drier than the forest nearby:
However plant transpiration provides local cooling only over forested land, so cooling mechanisms are needed for the 70% of earth that is water. You seem to have many interesting inventions for doing so. Have they been field tested? There is no funding for development of such innovative technologies!
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Tom Goreau
I’ve glanced at part of your postings and noticed your praise of the Cambridge City Council.
Over-building in Cambridge is squeezing more and more rain into smaller permeable areas as water tables are rising, so people will have to wade through sewage backups in the streets when it rains on swamps that were dumped with trash. I’m a lone voice here in Cambridge for climate-smart sustainable groundwater management.
I’ve lived here nearly 60 years, and the present City Council is mostly corrupt politicians bought by big outside developers, who are trying to change Cambridge into high rise Manhattan for their own profit. The handful of exceptions are a small minority: our city council is overwhelmingly in it for the money like politicians everywhere!
From:
planetary-...@googlegroups.com <planetary-...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of J GOODWIN <klin...@cox.net>
Date: Wednesday, January 7, 2026 at 00:28
To: Digest Recipients <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [prag] Re: Evidence of past WAIS collapse
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