Arkady Markin, Soviet engineer; Proposed that the United States and Soviet Union build a gigantic dam across the Bering Strait and use nuclear power–driven propeller pumps to push the warm Pacific current into the Atlantic by way of the Arctic Sea. Arctic ice would melt, and the Siberian and North American frozen areas would become temperate and productive. [1]
As much as we worry about climate change today, a warm, melted Arctic was actually a dream of geoengineers since at least the 19th century. But at the height of the Cold War, a Soviet scientist named Petr Mikhailovich Borisov proposed what may be the most ambitious Arctic melting project ever conceived: a dam spanning the 55 mile Bering Strait that would be big enough to redirect the currents of the world's oceans and force warming water to melt the Arctic Ocean forever. [2]
Russian Oil engineer, P.M. Borisov’s proposed melting the Arctic and Greenland icecaps by spreading black coal dust on the ice, creating cloud-cover across the poles to trap heat and to divert warm Atlantic waters into the polar regions. This scheme was taken seriously by Soviet climatologists. Two conferences were held in Leningrad in the early 1960′s following an initial meeting in Moscow by the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1959. [3]
Today, a complete switch-a-roo:
Two years ago a science writer from the Netherlands proposed a radical solution to combat melting in the Arctic. In his "North Pole Rescue Plan," Rolf Schuttenhelm suggests blocking the flow of water from the Bering Sea into the Arctic Ocean. He argues that this idea -- crazy as it sounds -- is worth exploring. [4]
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