If climate change has already gone too far, what could be our emergency solutions? Credit: MITAn interdisciplinary group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is exploring a space-based solar shield to reduce incoming radiation on Earth’s surface—hence combatting climate change.
Geoengineering might be our final and only option. Yet, most geoengineering proposals are earth-bound, which poses tremendous risks to our living ecosystem. Credit: MIT While addressing climate change necessarily requires lowering CO2 emission on the Earth, other approaches such as geoengineering could supplement such efforts if current mitigation and adaptation measures turned out to be inadequate for reversing the ongoing climate change trends.
In general, most research has not moved from a rough feasibility study stage yet. In this proposal, we are bringing together an interdisciplinary team of MIT scientists to do a next level of feasibility. As a working hypothesis, we propose to explore the idea of shielding solar radiation by deploying a set of bubble rafts composed of arrays of interconnected small inflatable bubbles close to the Lagrangian Point L1 in between the Sun and the Earth.
Further research will investigate the use of other types of low vapor-pressure materials to rapidly inflate and assemble bubble rafts ; key design metrics include the viscous, interfacial thermal properties of the bubble formers during inflation as well as the optical and structural properties of the bubble rafts when exposed to sun radiation.