Q. How will you mitigate the impact of your technology on the wildlife and environment of the Arctic?
A. We will be designing our technology with potential impacts on the environment and wildlife in mind to strive to design a scalable device that will go unnoticed by wildlife and focuses on eliminating negative impacts on the environment during operation.
How will you make sure you have no impact?
Real Ice will utilise the latest progress in existing underwater technology today to reduce the time needed to implement a renewable-powered approach to thicken sea ice that can be scaled. The technology proposed by Real Ice must be designed to re-ice areas of sea ice and complete its task while mitigating any potential negative consequences on the wider ecosystem. The latest underwater vehicles today are already designed to be retrievable, undetectable by wildlife and energy-efficient.
Our primary challenge is to investigate the impacts of our approach and the feasibility of scaling sea ice thickening to give humanity additional years to reduce emissions and transition to renewable energy. Demonstrating this approach will encourage governments, large industrial partners and local communities to acknowledge that sea ice thickening may be used to preserve and restore large areas of the Arctic ecosystem.
At every stage of our R&D process, Real Ice aims to collaborate with institutions and local communities to understand the positive and negative consequences of sea ice thickening. By taking incremental steps in our R&D roadmap, we will learn how to reduce the negative impact of our activities on the Arctic ecosystem.