Increasing Antarctic Ice Mass to Help Offset Sea Level Rise

• Published in: Atmosphere
• Main Authors: Erik J. L. Larson, Karen H. Rosenlof, Ru-Shan Gao
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2023
• Subjects: sea level rise; mitigation; cloud seeding; Meteorology. Climatology; QC851-999; Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14101564; https://doaj.org/article/4557b8faff3e41b29ab820b8b7b3d0ca

Global sea level is predicted to rise for centuries even if greenhouse gas emissions are greatly reduced. Sea level rise (SLR) threatens coastal communities where a large fraction of the human population lives. A possible mitigation effort is to increase the ice mass in Antarctica. Coastal Antarctic radiosonde profiles are supersaturated with respect to ice on average 47% of the time. If all of this excess water vapor and supercooled liquid cloud water were removed from the atmosphere and deposited on the Antarctic landmass, it would offset 11 cm of SLR by 2100, or about 15 (8–17) percent of the predicted SLR. This strategy could be used to supplement other efforts to reduce climate change impacts, such as carbon dioxide removal or solar climate intervention.