In her long career as an engineer and educator, Leslie Field has helped get the lead out of gasoline, inspired hundreds of students as a Stanford University lecturer, and earned dozens of patents for innovations with billion-dollar impacts on industries as diverse as oil and microelectronics.

Such accomplishments pale in comparison to her latest undertaking, however, a “Silicon Valley moonshot” called Ice911. Its mission: Mitigate climate change by restoring ice in the Arctic. How? Spread an environmentally safe, white silica sand in strategic locations to reflect heat “like a white shirt on a hot summer day” and protect the ice below, explains the nonprofit’s website.

Ice911 is just one of the many intriguing – and unsettling – initiatives to emerge from the controversial new field of geoengineering. These intentional, large-scale manipulations of the environment tackle different processes but share a common goal of  counteracting the effects of global warming. At Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, for example, investigators are working on novel aerosols that might reduce or even reverse ozone loss as well as reduce stratospheric heating. Other researchers are examining the public’s perceptions and policy implications of geoengineering.

The New Yorker laid out geoengineering’s pros, cons, and players in a thoughtful May 2012 article by Michael Specter called “The Climate Fixers.” Field, who founded Ice911 in 2006 after seeing the environmental call-to-arm An Inconvenient Truth, understands the widespread anxiety about such massive technological interventions. Thus, she starts with the principle of “do no harm” and seeks safe, reversible solutions.

White sand, dubbed “Arctic dust” in the December 9, 2018 episode of Podcast Earth, fits the bill.

Inert and lightweight, the silica microspheres that Field and her team spent a decade researching and testing, don’t attract oil-based pollutants and are considered safe for arctic creatures. Moreover, the particles – which are basically engineered silicon dioxide, or beach sand, not plastic – can be evenly distributed atop the ice. And since they are hollow, they float on the melt water, preserving the protective covering in spring.

Ice911 has tested several methods for spreading the sand without putting humans on sea ice. (See image from a winter test that illustrates this blog post excerpt.) In April 2017, researchers automatically deployed sand across 17,500 square meters of Arctic ice. In 2018, they used the same method to cover 15,000 square meters of ice. The goal within a few years is to protect 15,000 to 100,000 square kilometers.

Learn more about Field and her work in the Xinova profile, “Love and Ice,”

Filed under: Special Features

Tags: arctic ice, Climate Change, Environmental Engineering, Environmental science, geoengineering, global warming, Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program, ice911, Leslie Field, Public Policy, Web Resources, Women in Engineering