A review of the five main methods proposed for cooling down the poles or slowing the loss of ice concludes they are all wildly impractical, wouldn’t work, or both
By Michael Le Page
9 September 2025
Can we slow the melting of the ice caps?
Ulrik Pedersen/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
With carbon dioxide emissions still increasing, can geoengineering halt the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps and prevent massive sea level rises? No, according to a review of the five main ideas for polar geoengineering proposed so far.
Promoting geoengineering ideas that cannot work distracts attention from the key issue, says Martin Siegert at the University of Exeter in the UK. “It becomes something that is working against what we need to do, which is to decarbonise.”
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Siegert and his colleagues assessed each polar geoengineering idea based on six criteria: will it work, can it be done at the scale required in a reasonable time, is it affordable, will countries agree to it and be able to maintain that agreement for many decades, what are the environmental risks and will it raise false hopes?
In Antarctica, some ice sheets rest on the seabed and are being melted from below by warming ocean waters. One proposed idea to save them is to build immense “curtains” to stop warm currents from reaching these ice sheets and the floating ice shelves that help protect them.
It is not clear if this would help, says team member Steven Chown at Monash University in Australia.