Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier Gets a $80 Billion Band-Aid

What if we could save the world's coastlines with a 50-mile-long underwater curtain? That's exactly what an international team of scientists is investigating this month as they deploy sensors around Thwaites Glacier—Antarctica's so-called "doomsday glacier" that threatens to add two feet of sea-level rise if it collapses.

The mission sounds like science fiction: Drop fiber-optic cables through a 3,200-foot borehole in the ice, then use robots to map the seabed where warm ocean currents are literally eating the glacier from below. But the data they're collecting could determine whether humanity's most audacious climate intervention yet—a 500-foot-tall seabed curtain costing up to $80 billion—might actually work.

The Knife's Edge

David Holland, a climate scientist at NYU aboard the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon, describes the current situation as being "on a knife's edge." Right now, warm water barely crests a natural rocky moraine before flowing toward the glacier's base. If that underwater ridge were just a little taller, it could block those destructive currents entirely.

The Seabed Curtain Project aims to build exactly that—an artificial barrier atop the moraine to divert warm water away from Thwaites. The engineering challenge is staggering: constructing a curtain up to 50 miles long in one of Earth's most remote and hostile environments.

Yet the stakes couldn't be higher. Thwaites acts as a cork holding back the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains enough water to raise global sea levels by nearly 17 feet. Scientists agree that without intervention, the glacier will accelerate its retreat within the next century and eventually collapse completely.

From Fringe to Funded

Just a few years ago, this kind of targeted geoengineering was considered a "bête noire" in the glaciology community. John Moore, the University of Lapland glaciologist who first proposed the curtain idea, was pushing a fringe concept that most colleagues dismissed.

Today, the project has raised millions from philanthropic foundations, including Outlier Projects (run by a former Meta executive) and the Tom Wilhelmsen Foundation. The shift reflects a broader acceptance that climate interventions may be inevitable as decarbonization fails to proceed quickly enough.

Marianne Hagen, a former Norwegian deputy minister who now co-leads the curtain project, admits she once considered geoengineering "science fiction." But watching the Ukraine war derail European climate commitments changed her perspective. "I ended up in John's camp, mostly out of despair, because I could not see a safe pathway forward for future generations without doing the necessary research on these Band-Aid, buy-time solutions."

The curtain project isn't alone. The Arête Glacier Initiative is investigating refreezing Thwaites to bedrock by pumping out lubricating meltwater. Real Ice is trying to thicken Arctic sea ice by pumping seawater on top. All are finding "lots of enthusiasm among the philanthropic community" for localized interventions, according to Caltech geophysicist Brent Minchew.

The Great Divide

But the scientific community remains deeply split. In a prominent fall paper, University of Exeter polar glaciologist Martin Siegert and 41 co-authors systematically dismantled polar geoengineering proposals, arguing they're too expensive, technically impossible, and potentially damaging to fragile ecosystems.

More fundamentally, critics worry these projects offer false hope that distracts from the real solution: cutting fossil fuel use. Ted Scambos, who co-led major US-UK research on Thwaites, now strongly opposes geoengineering research, especially given the Trump administration's cuts to climate science funding. "We absolutely should not fund or support efforts, or even tests, of climate or ice loss mitigation methods," he argues.

Geoengineering proponents see this opposition as equally shortsighted. Moore compares traditional climate research to "choosing the best seat on the Titanic to listen to the last tune of the orchestra as the ship goes down," while studying interventions is like "launching a few lifeboats."

The economics seem to support intervention. Moore estimates the curtain could cost $40-80 billion to install and $1-2 billion annually to maintain—compared to an estimated $40 billion per year to adapt to rising sea levels globally.

The Regulatory Maze

Perhaps the thorniest questions aren't technical but political. Building a massive structure in Antarctic waters would require approval from all 29 member nations of the Antarctic Treaty System—a complex process that could take decades.

Some argue this actually makes polar geoengineering more feasible than global interventions like stratospheric aerosol injection, which would need consensus from all 193 UN members. Others worry about breaking existing environmental protections and endangering the treaty altogether.

Minchew frames the intervention as environmental preservation, arguing that letting Thwaites collapse arguably violates the treaty's environmental-preservation clause. But critics see it as setting a dangerous precedent for industrial activity in pristine Antarctica.