A novel and expensive idea to deal with Antarctica's "doomesday" glacier. Assuming it or similar project could be built, serious questions remain.
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Are such ideas feasible, how much would they cost, and what are the ethics of all this? Moore puts the likely bill for erecting a curtain across the Amundsen Sea at up to $80 billion. That is a lot of money. But much less, he says, than the trillions of dollars that might be needed to protect coastlines from rising tides caused by the loss of the two glaciers.
Others question this analysis. “I don’t doubt we could spend a decade building the curtain,” says Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. “It is a naturally attractive idea that one big project can make the difference. But curtains may just displace the heat elsewhere, melting other ice.” In any event, she says, sea-level rise would continue as a result of factors such as thermal warming of the oceans, land subsidence, and changes in ocean circulation, as well as the melting of other land ice, such as on Greenland. “So the question is whether this is the right place to put our resources, including limited research funding.”
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