Antarctica as Earth’s Store of Coolth

Towards a New Theory of Climate Resilience

Antarctica holds 60-70% of Earth’s freshwater; freshwater hoarded at the South Pole and also frozen! It is a store of what I’m calling coolth. The physical mechanism is the latent heat of fusion, where melting ice absorbs heat from the surrounding ocean and atmosphere without raising its own temperature.

I promised to reveal my new theory of ‘how climate works’ across six weeks. Beginning last Friday, I explained ‘evaporation and precipitation’ as the mechanism for preventing the tropical oceans from overheating, plank #1. It’s week two and I’m offering up plank #2 — ice as a cooling energy storage system, with masses of it in Antarctica.

Let me place this in a political context, how we can quickly get to that net-zero climate target and only sacrifice a fraction of the Antarctic ice sheet. Consider this a thought experiment.

Imagine melting just enough of Antarctica’s massive ice sheet to cool the Northern Hemisphere by 1.5°C, hitting that net-zero climate target.

Antarctica’s ice, a 26.5 million cubic-kilometre frozen giant, holds ‘coolth’—a real word for the state of being cool—that could, in theory, chill the planet.