Page 218 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Warming the arctic

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

Whenever the Alaskan gates to the pole are unbarred, the whole of the ice-cap of
the circumpolar regions must at once melt away; all the plants of the northern con-
tinents, now kept in narrow bounds by the arctic cold, would begin their march
towards the pole. . . . It is not too much to say that the life-sustaining power of the
lands north of forty degrees of latitude would be doubled by the breaking down of
the barrier which cuts off the Japanese current from the pole. 30

In 1912 Carroll Livingston Riker, an engineer, inventor, and industrialist,
proposed a scheme to change the climate of polar regions by tinkering with the
ocean currents of the Atlantic. This was to be accomplished by preventing the
cold Labrador Current from colliding with the Gulf Stream. To do this, he pro-
posed building a 200-mile causeway extending east from Cape Race off the coast
of Newfoundland. The theory was that the causeway could be built by suspend-
ing a long rope cable, or “obstructor,” in the ocean that would act to slow the
southward flow of the Labrador Current, causing it to deposit its sediment load.
Potential benefits of diverting the Gulf Stream farther east (shades of Thomas
Jefferson) included fewer fogs and a general warming of northern climates. Rik-
er’s proposal was inspired by recently completed mega-projects such as Henry
Flagler’s railroad bridge from Key West, Florida, to the mainland and the ongo-
ing excavation of the Panama Canal. The tragic sinking of the Titanic also lent
urgency to his proposal, since his causeway might help remove icebergs from
shipping lanes. Riker was supported in Congress by Representative William
Musgrave Calder (R-New York), who proposed the creation 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
currents of the Grand Banks would be useful. 31
An ice-free Arctic ocean was one of the largest-scale and most widely
discussed climate-engineering projects of the time. Jules Verne’s story The
Purchase of the North Pole (1889) may have been inspired by such ideas. Ironi-
cally, an ice-free Arctic ocean is something we may actually see sooner or
later through a combination of natural and anthropogenic influences. In
1957 Soviet academician Borisov, alluding to the centuries-old quest of the

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