There Is An Ice-Making Submarine That Can Combat Global Warming

For the last few years, global warming has been at the forefront of the scientific community as one of the biggest threats to humanity yet. The heightening severity of global warming has caused rapid ice melts in the polar regions, ultimately leading to an observably dangerous rise of the sea level worldwide.

Ever since evidence and the risks of global warming became known to the academe, a lot of suggestions and projects have been created to halt or eliminate the problem. The newest one is probably this iceberg generating machine.

Re-Freezing the Polar Ice Caps

According to a report, a team of designers hailing from Indonesia, including Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, Denny Lesmana Budi, and Fiera Alifa, proposed an engineering project whose final product would be a type of submarine that can ‘re-freeze’ the melting ice to create icebergs. Doing this on a large enough scale, they hoped, would be able to control the developing situation at the poles.

The concept of the project was presented through a video submitted to a contest hosted by the Association of Siamese Architects. Aside from just proposing quite an interesting idea alone, they have also taken up second place in the competition.

Simple Design

For the nearly insurmountable task that the project is aiming to resolve, the entirety of the idea is rather simple.

The submarine’s shape is designed like a hexagonal water tank that can submerge itself and fill the internal bays with melted polar ice water. Within the submarine is a complicated series of machinery that can desalinate the contained water. When the water is completely pure, it is taken to be re-frozen. When the freezing process is completed, the machine re-surfaced, released the newly reformed block of hexagonal ice water. Then dived down and restarted the entire process.

If you can imagine an entire fleet of such machines that constantly go up and down constantly pumping out ice blocks, it seems like quite a good idea. But some experts on the topic don’t exactly think so.

Criticisms

According to experts, the entirety of the project could only serve to exacerbate the process if there are fossil fuels involved. With such an industrial scale of operation, using gas or oil is, at this moment, the only option that it's got. But since they’re the chief culprit behind the entire trend, it’s understandable why the project’s being lambasted.

However, if the designers found a way to incorporate clean, renewable energy sources to the project, it could be a great weapon to combat global warming.

In fact, according to Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder and part of the University of Colorado. If the new icebergs could reach a certain size, they could help to curb the rise of the global sea level by increasing the Earth’s albedo. This can help the planet to reflect solar radiation back into space with greater efficiency. Solar radiation is the thing that causes the rise in global temperature.

But having a greater number of icebergs on the water, he said, wouldn’t really affect the sea level in any direct, meaningful way unless they can find their way to land.

"Just A Band-Aid"

The entire submarine is a temporary fix, as well, similar to the band-aid instead of an actual medicine or treatment. Now the main problem is greenhouse gases that we generate by tonnages on a daily basis. This is the problem we need to address to ‘cure’ the planet and to pave the way for any rectification projects at all to work smoothly.