How the USSR Tried to Melt the Arctic

The tale of one intrepid Soviet scientist , his seeking to dam the Bering Strait , meld the Arctic and convey successfulness to the Frozen North . Aside from the monumental , man - made worldwide thawing , what could possibly go wrong ?

The idea of melting the Arctic ice cap date at least to the 1870s , when Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler suggested channelise more of the affectionate Kuroshio Current through the Bering Strait :

Whenever the Alaskan gates to the pole are unbarred , the whole of the crank - cap of the circumpolar regions must at once disappear out ; all the plant life of the northerly continents , now kept in narrow bounds by the arctic cold , would commence their marchland towards the perch … It is not too much to say that the life - sustain world power of the terra firma northerly of forty degree of latitude would be doubled by the breaking down of the barrier which cut off the Nipponese electric current from the perch .

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In 1912 Carroll Livingston Riker , an engineer , artificer , and industrialist , propose a scheme to change the climate of polar regions by tinkering with the ocean current of the Atlantic . This was to be accomplished by forestall the cold Labrador Current from jar with the Gulf Stream . To do this , he declare oneself building a 200 - mile causeway extend east from Cape Race off the coast of Newfoundland . The theory was that the causeway could be built by suspending a farseeing rope cablegram , or “ obstruction , ” in the ocean that would act to slow the southbound current of the Labrador Current , causing it to deposit its sediment burden . Potential benefits of diverting the Gulf Stream farther east ( ghost of Thomas Jefferson ) include fewer fogs and a general warming of northern climates . Riker ’s proposal was inspired by recently completed mega - projects such as Henry Flagler ’s railroad bridgework from Key West , Florida , to the mainland and the ongoing excavation of the Panama Canal . The tragic sinking of the Titanic also bestow urgency to his proposal , since his causeway might aid off icebergs from ship lane . Riker was supported in Congress by Representative William Musgrave Calder ( R - New York ) , who offer the innovation of a Commission on the Labrador Current and Gulf Stream . Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was not at all convinced by the proposal , but thought that a general survey of the current of the Grand Banks would be useful .

An ice - free Arctic Ocean was one of the tumid - scale and most widely discourse climate - engineering projects of the clock time . Jules Verne ’s fib The Purchase of the North Pole ( 1889 ) may have been inspired by such ideas . Ironically , an ice - free Arctic ocean is something we may in reality see sooner or later through a compounding of lifelike and anthropogenic influences . In 1957 Soviet academician Borisov , alluding to the century - old quest of the Russian people to overcome the Northland frigidity , propose building a dam across the Bering Strait to melt the Arctic ocean ice . In legion articles and then again in his book Can Man interchange the Climate ? ( 1973 ) , Borisov detailed his visual sensation of a dike 50 miles long and almost 200 feet in high spirits with shipping locks and pumping stations . He proposed that the dam be built in 820 - animal foot sections made of preassemble freeze - resistance ferroconcrete that could be drift to the construction site and anchor to the sea bottom with pilings . He further suggested that the top of the dam be shaped so that chicken feed floes would ride up over the dam and break off on the southerly side . An alternative design included an intercontinental highway and railroad . According to Borisov , “ What mankind needs is state of war against frigid , rather than a ‘ inhuman warfare . ' ”

To waste Arctic sea ice rink , Borisov wanted to pump cold seawater out of the Arctic Ocean , across the dekametre , and into the Bering Sea and the North Pacific . This displacement would provide the inflow of warmer pee from the North Atlantic , eliminate fresh water in the airfoil layer in several year , and thus foreclose the organisation of ice in the Arctic Basin , make warmer climate conditions :

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In this daytime and years , with human beings ’s expatiate major power of transmute the instinctive surroundings , the task we are advance does not present any technical difficulties . The pumping of the ardent Atlantic urine across into the Pacific ocean will take the Arctic sea out of its present country of a dead - end basin for the Atlantic water [ and ] drive the Arctic Earth’s surface water out into the Pacific ocean through the Bering Strait .

His destination was to remove a 200 - foot layer of cold Earth’s surface piss , which would be replaced by warm , salty water that would not freeze down . Inspired by Markin ’s popular book Soviet Electric Power , Borisov also assumed that huge amount of money of electrical energy would soon be available to fly the coop the pumps , perhaps from hydroelectric generator or nuclear reactors .

The dam was , of course , never built , but if it had been assay , would the nations of the world have confronted the Russians ? The net climatical issue of the project , if it had been carried out , is still extremely unsealed . A good statement can be made that the effect would be less than that of course occurring variation in the Atlantic influx , but none of the computer models at the meter were sophisticated enough to show any robust result . Other sea - engineering schemes include instal elephantine turbines in the Strait of Florida to generate electricity and add a thin pic of alcohol to the northerly branch of the Gulf Stream to decrease aerofoil water evaporation and warm the weewee by several degree , although the cod might become rather tipsy .

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In Japan , engineers reckon that the icy Sea of Okhotsk could be tamed by debar the tender Kuroshio Current with a dam or one - manner weewee valve built at the Tatarsk Strait . And in a 1970 geo - engineering experiment think suitable only for try on a computer exemplar ( are n’t they all ? ) , the Nipponese geo - scientific speculator Keiji Higuichi wondered what would happen to the global atmospherical and pelagic circulation and thus the earth ’s climate if the Drake Passage , between the tip of South America and Antarctica , was blocked by an meth dekametre . One possibility was the onset of a novel ice age .

Russian scientist warned of potential climate disruption from such mega - project . Borisov admit that the great - scale climatical and ecological effects of his Bering Strait dike could not be fully foretell , nor could they be confined within the perimeter of any one national state of matter ; rather , they would directly involve the interior interests of the Soviet Union , Canada , Denmark , and the United States and indirectly affect many countries in other sphere that might experience climate variety make by the project . With such a dam in place , the halfway - parallel of latitude winters would be milder due to the warming of Arctic and diametric gentle wind pot . He thought areas such as the Sahara would be much substantially watered and would perhaps become into steppe acres or Savannah River . Direct benefits of an ice rink - spare Arctic sea would admit raw , more - direct shipping routes between East Asia and Europe , while , by his overly affirmative computation , ocean - level rise would be meek , even with the melt of the Greenland ice cap . Yet such climatic changes elsewhere were of little concern to the Soviets . Larisa R. Rakipova mark that a square Arctic warming could cool down the winters in Africa by 5oC ( 9oF ) , “ lead to a complete disruption of the living conditions for citizenry , animals , and plants , ” and Oleg A. Drozdov warned that the warming of the Arctic would lead to a total breakdown of wet exchange between the sea and continents with spare rainfall in the Far East and great fruitlessness in Europe . The resulting drastic change in the soils , vegetation , water regime , and other natural conditions would have far-flung negatively charged ecological , economical , and societal consequence . As in the fictional case described earlier in The Evacuation of England , Rusin and Flit also wondered what might happen if the Americans implemented one of their projects and turned the Gulf Stream toward the shore of America : “ In Europe the temperature would drop sharply and glacier would begin to advance rapidly ” . In his book The Gulf Stream ( 1973 ) , T. F. Gaskell point out , “ This is why such natural phenomenon as the Gulf Stream have political implications . ”37 Geo - railroad engineer should realize that the same is true of a wide-cut range of a function of natural phenomena .

In addition to ocean ice , the Soviets were also combat the “ curse of the Siberians ” – permafrost as blockheaded as 1,600 foot in places . one suggestion to move out it involved utilize soot to the snowfields to absorb more sunlight ; or perhaps cheaper materials such as ash or peat could do the job . cue their readers that “ everyone knows what permafrost is , ” Rusin and Flit recounted its horrors : “ A new make menage unexpectedly begin to dislodge , a Russian stove suddenly begins to sink into the basis , deeply driven pile give from the earth , ” and when it melts and refreezes , the trees of the secret “ boozy forests ” lean akilter , like a Siberian full of vodka . In the twenty - first 100 , permafrost has reemerged not as a local curse but as something to be saved , in part to maintain the migration patterns of the caribou and caribou , and as a global environmental issue because of its high methane petrol subject matter . In 1962 Rusin and Flit opined , “ Much has been learned , but it has been impossible to whole eliminate permafrost . ”

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James Rodger Fleming is a historian of skill and technology and professor of skill , technology and society at Colby College . He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He recently held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace chronicle at the Smithsonian Institution .

Fixing the Sky : the Checkered chronicle of Weather and Climate Control is available atAmazon .

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