Our Biggest Experiment by Bell Alice;

Author:Bell, Alice;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Chapter Eight

Big Science

A student slightly late to their 9am lecture at Penn State on 8 December 1939 might have spotted a group of geology lab assistants methodically sprinkling a dark powder over a small part of the campus. It was a cold and foggy morning, and the ground was covered in a light dusting of snow. The researchers had carefully measured out a patch of the snow and were covering it with what looked, on closer inspection, to be coal dust. They were also sticking thermometers in the ground, taking careful notes of their readings. Looking up to the geology lab, their colleagues were placing coal-dust-covered ice cubes on a sunny window ledge too. A week later, they were at it again. This time there was a clear, cloudless sky, but it was still bitterly cold, probably colder than before. But they were still sprinkling the ground with coal dust, taking measurements and standing back to watch. Peering in for a closer look, you might have seen the patch sprinkled with coal dust had become criss-crossed with small channels, melting away faster than the fresh snow around it. The researchers seemed excited, like they’d found something. ‘Best send some down to Byrd at the Antarctic then, eh? Let him have a go!’

Professor Helmut Landsberg, who was leading the experiment, wrote up the research the following spring for the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The basic science wasn’t new. Benjamin Franklin had done similar experiments, wrapping blocks of ice in dark fabric. Fresh white snow and ice reflect much of the Sun’s rays; darken the surface and they’ll absorb more of the heat, and so melt faster. It’s why rooftops in sunnier parts of the world are sometimes painted white and it’s a good idea to avoid wearing black in the summer. Today, the darkening of snow in the polar regions, caused by soot from wildfires, is something polar researchers study in detail. They wonder, for example, if soot from the Industrial Revolution may have caused the retreat of Alpine glaciers in the mid-nineteenth century, hastening the end of the ‘little ice age’, and is having a similar effect today.

But Landsberg wasn’t working out of concern for the health of glaciers (quite the opposite in fact). He thought a more precise understanding of sooting ice might help people clear frozen roads so they’d be safer to drive on. Moreover, the same method might be applied at scale, opening up land in the northerly parts of the US so they could be better used for the growing of crops or timber. Landsberg wasn’t about to stop there either: ‘It is utopian to propose covering large ice fields each spring with dark dust,’ he mused, ‘but it would seem to be feasible at least to melt off considerable portions of glaciers.’ Dust the Antarctic ice sheet with coal each summer to increase the rate of melting and, though it’d take a few years, eventually the glaciers would be gone. For Landsberg, at the time, this was an efficient use of the Sun’s rays – it was his idea of solar power.

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