Ice Hell is Our Future

The Lake Erie pressure ridges will be back.  Our Arctic ice volume will zoom back to the 70's.

I had to do a separate blog on this because there is such a neat story behind it.  Back in 1980 I had just joined the old company and it was an exciting place to work.  We had lots of money and we were doing things.  We were convinced that power demand was going up 5% year and this meant building a new nuclear plant every year.

We also had huge coal plants and were cleaning them up.  As such, we had surplus power, and were looking for markets.  Someone came up with the bright idea to lay power cables on the bottom of Lake Erie and ship power to the States.

It was cheap to just lay the cables on the bottom, and getting more expensive to bury them, along with more power loss.  So we did a side-scan sonar survey.  Then we found these huge trenches all over the place, even to the deepest spot.  We couldn't believe it, since there were Canadian natural gas wells all over the place.

A little inquiry found the deep, dark secret -- those nasty gas people were getting the pipes broken all the time and blurping gas all over the place.  They never mentioned it in the press releases.  :)  And it happened in the winter.

So, on one particularly nasty 1980's winter, our colleague ventured out in a helicopter at 20 below.  He got this amazing video.  It showed 'ice tectonics', exactly the same as plate tectonics.  There were huge subduction zones where the ice dived under the Himalayas.  Since 9 tenths of the ice is underwater, you can see that these pressure ridges had a deep keel.

That kaboshed the whole plan.  We would have to bury the cables something like 3 m, which was bad.  No cable.