New paper: Artificial flooding leads to thicker and brighter Arctic sea ice

A new peer-reviewed paper presents the first full-season field trial of artificial sea ice thickening through winter flooding in the Canadian Arctic. 

Members of the Centre for Climate Repair worked with Real Ice to combine laboratory assessments with experiments in the field to better our understanding of the approach. In a statement, Real Ice said:

During the 2024/25 field campaign in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, we tested whether pumping seawater onto Arctic sea ice during winter could increase ice thickness and improve melt-season resilience.

By the end of the winter growth season, flooded areas were up to 32 cm thicker than untreated ice, roughly equivalent to the magnitude of sea ice thinning observed locally over the past 50 years. We also observed that treated areas remained brighter during the melt season and appeared to melt more slowly than surrounding control areas. These findings provide the first real-world evidence that winter flooding can measurably alter sea ice evolution across both the growth and melt seasons. The work begins to answer several key questions: whether the approach is physically effective outside of models, how flooding timing and frequency affect outcomes, and whether treated ice behaves differently during summer melt.

At the same time, many important questions remain. Future work will focus on understanding the mechanisms behind the increased brightness and slower melt rates, quantifying impacts on albedo and surface energy balance, assessing ecological and community implications, and evaluating how the approach might scale operationally in different Arctic environments. Addressing these questions will require coordinated work across the University of Cambridge led RASI consortium, whose combination of modelling, laboratory experimentation and field testing provides a unique opportunity to accelerate progress through short feedback loops between theory, controlled experiments and real-world observations.

We see this research as an important foundation for an extensive scientific effort to explore whether targeted sea ice thickening could contribute to slowing Arctic sea ice loss, extending seasonal ice persistence, and supporting Arctic ecosystems and communities facing rapid climate change.

This research reflects a broad collaboration: thank you to Ed Blanchard-Wrigglesworth from the University of Washington,the Centre for Climate Repair for co-funding this study, Polar Knowledge & the Canadian High Arctic Research Station, and crucially the Cambridge Bay community for their invaluable knowledge and support.

The research continues with our 2025/6 field work now well underway, supported by follow-on funding from the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA).