On my first day at SXSW, I was able to attend the “Mitigating Climate Change with reflective Sand Panel?” on March 9th. Leading up to the panel and even afterwards, I had the opportunity to speak with the panelist presenting, Dr. Leslie Field, about the technology and what it means for affecting climate change. Dr. Field, a Lecturer in Engineering at Stanford University, developed the sustainable technology out of a desire to preserve the world for her children, as well as discover ways to slow down climate change effects separate from CO2 emissions.

Whether it’s obscenely hotter temperatures during the summer or the havoc caused by natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey, there’s no question that climate change is leaving on the world we inhabit. Indeed, this has prompted many around the globe to do their part in trying to make the world’s climate more habitable, coming in forms such as planting more trees for CO2 consumption and finding alternative methods of energy/transportation. Other methods of mitigating and slowing the effects of climate change exist—one of which involves the use of “reflective sand”, (hollow glass beads), to compensate for the loss of Arctic ice over the past several decades.

Dubbing this project her “Inconvenient Hobby” (a reference to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth), Dr. Field wanted to study the particular cause behind the ice caps dissolution, as well as their function for the planet. What she found was astounding.

“The Arctic ice cap acts like a white ‘t-shirt’ for the planet,” she discussed, “and harmlessly turns away up to ninety percent of all solar radiation coming from the sun. Ice loss has contributed twenty to twenty-five percent of all global temperature rise since the year 2006. When ice in the Arctic is gone, it raises the risk of methane release, and the experts’ prediction is that we will have ice-free summers in the Arctic by 2030, plus or minus ten years.”

Through various rounds of field testing and observation, Dr. Field and her colleagues eventually came to create and establish hollow glass beads as the least hazardous and most effective way to fight the loss of ice in the Arctic as well as avoid the most harmful effects of incoming solar radiation.

“We’ve done testing starting from buckets on the porch to the Sierra Nevada mountains, Canada, Minnesota, and even three seasons of testing in the Arctic—all with permission, of course.”

Despite there not being enough done presently on climate change, Dr. Field is optimistic due to growing investments in solar energy and reaching out to the public with her project.

“Fortunately, many people and foundations are getting it, and supporting this kind of work,” she describes. “In the past year, we’ve been working with a phenomenal group of climate modelers, real experts, who take the results of what we do with the glass beads and show what the impact of this would be if we could go to the scale that we want to.

“They have found that if certain areas, even small ones, were to be covered by this material, it can have a big and positive impact on the climate.”

Additionally, those who may think that this is a call to carpet the Arctic with sand can rest easy.

“We want to do something small and localized to start, and as we scale up to still work only in the most strategic, relatively small areas, so that if there were ever to be some unintended consequence, we could change what was problematic if needed. We live by our first principle of “First do no harm

Dr. Leslie Field presented at her “Mitigating Climate Change with Reflective Sand?” panel on March 9^th, 2019 at 5:00pm in The LINE Onyx Ballroom 1. To learn more about her work, visit the www.ice911.org website to see what all is happening and what can be done to take action now in order to save the climate!