Unusual technique: A giant screen might offset the effects of climate change and slow down the melting of glaciers like this one in the Swiss Alps.
Credit: iStockphoto
BERLIN: Researchers trying to slow melting glaciers have set up a large screen in the Swiss Alps that they hope will trap cold air over the icy mass.
"We hope our installations will bring about a net cooling of the area, and if the melt is not stopped, that it is at least slowed," said the project's leader, geography professor Hans-Joachim Fuchs of Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.
Icy windscreen
Fuchs and 27 students stretched 15 m of durable plastic sheeting between two three-metre-high steel poles to form a windbreak on the Rhone glacier in Switzerland's southwestern Valais region.
The idea is to harness cold winds – also known as kabatic winds – coming down the mountain slopes, holding cool air over the ice for longer. The researchers hope this will dampen the effects of longer summers and warmer temperatures caused by global climate change.
The Rhone Glacier, the source of the Rhone River and a contributor to Lake Geneva, lies between Interlaken and the Italian border at an elevation of 2,300 m. It is shrinking by four or five metres per year, according to researchers from the University of Zürich in Switzerland.
Fuchs and his students are now analysing data collected over ten days, measuring temperature, relative humidity, winds and surface temperature. The group were also given access to a special camera used by fire departments to detect temperature differentials.
"We were hoping the weather could be better, more high-pressure zones, but we got everything: sun, snow, strong wind from the mountain down across the glacier, strong wind from the glacier up the mountain," Fuchs says. "But this way we'll see the experiment as exposed to all different conditions."
Bigger things
Scientists have revealed that many of the splendid glaciers in the Alps and around the world – huge rivers of ice that are millennial features of cold environments – are ever-more-rapidly disappearing. Some predict that all of Europe's ancient glaciers will be gone within 30 years.
Already, lightweight fabric covers are dragged over some glacial ice in the Alps to reflect sunlight and to keep the Sun's rays off the surface. But glaciers are generally much too large for this – an average glacier still spans many kilometres.
If Fuchs gets good results, he'll try to drum up support for something larger. But his experiment has already gained significant attention from the German press – and drawn some flak as well.
Glaciologists at the ETH Zürich, a leading technical university in Switzerland, told the German magazine Der Spiegel that glacial melting isn't linked to wind temperature, but to sunlight. They said it would take years to measurably affect the development of a glacier, and expressed doubt that a screen could significantly affect wind patterns.
Fuchs concedes that glacial melting is caused by the Sun's rays. "But you also have the night-time effects," he says. He thinks cold air masses accumulated at night might reduce ice melt during the day. Results should be in by early December.
we need mirrors on vast scale
If 1/10th of our deserts were "mirrored" this would more than meet ALL of (USA's electrical) needs. I'm sure that would not do much enviro damage and would indeed reflect some light back into space, thus cooling the planet a small bit! The opposite effect happens with (black) solar PV as with parking lots. I know that if all the countries and states passed a law like Prop 7 (California) which require 50% renewable by 2025, we would not have to see all of the glaciers melt! Especially if most of that energy came from mirrors reflecting the sunlight into generators (solar power towers) with a spill over effect that acts as a giant semi transparent sunscreen in space!
When people talk about green
When people talk about green energy, they only focus on the local effects. They forget that climate change is a global consequence!
In order to produce green energy, we have to manufacture equipments and machines such as wind turbine, solar panels etc. But CO2 is produced at the same time! Maybe developed countries are happy to see and declare that their energy consumption has shifted significantly from fossil energy to green energy. They forget to tell us that they only shifted the CO2 emissions into developing countries. Because more and more companies are moving their manufacturing into developing countries! Somttimes developing countries are thus accused of polluting the planet!
So, consider the earth as a system, if its whole CO2 emission is not reduced, then it does not matter how much green energy produced in some countries, global climate change is bound to happen.