With Antarctica losing its ice three times faster than six years ago, scientists have taken a page out of Donald Trump's book to prevent further glacier melt.
By building walls of rock and sand from the sea floor, scientists believe they could halt the melting of glaciers as they disintegrate into the sea.
While the idea may seem far-fetched, it could buy some time in the battle against climate change and rising sea levels.
- Climate change: Sea level rise inevitable
- Antarctica melts: The impact on New Zealand
- New satellite to study sea level rises, ice sheets
It takes 360 billion tonnes of ice to melt to raise sea levels just one millimetre, but the reality is Antarctica has a lot of ice - 30 million cubic kilometres of it. That's enough to raise sea levels by 58 metres.
The design of the rock and sand barriers would be a simple solution, says a new paper published on Thursday in the Cryosphere journal, from the European Geosciences Union.
The barriers could hold back melting glaciers by preventing warm water from reaching them under the sea.
"We are imagining very simple structures, simply piles of gravel or sand on the ocean floor," Michael Wolovick, a researcher at the department of geosciences at Princeton University in the US, told the Guardian.
He said the designs are within "plausible human achievements".
The research team found that, to be successful, the barriers on the sea floor would need to be about 300m high, and would require around 0.1 to 1.5 cubic km of combined material.
These estimates relate to Antarctica's Thwaites glacier - one of the widest in the world at 80-100km.
But these simple structures would only deliver a 30 percent chance of preventing collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet, models created by the researchers show.
Nevertheless, subsea glacier melting is understood to be a major contributor to rising sea levels.
Scientists are exploring more ways of protecting massive sea ice - such as Britain-sized Thwaite's glacier - from melting and increasing sea levels by up to three metres.
A United Nations report leaked to Reuters in June says climate change is on course to far exceed the goals set in the Paris agreement by around 2040, which could threaten economic growth.
The report warns that "human-induced warming" will exceed 1.5degC by 2040, if emissions continue at their present rate.
"The more carbon we emit, the less likely it becomes that the ice sheets will survive in the long term at anything close to their present volume," Mr Wolovick told the Guardian.
The authors of the Cryosphere report proposing glacier barriers hope their models will encourage more research into the engineering required to execute such projects, which could take decades to be implemented.
Newshub.
