As summer temperatures continue to rise every year, glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica are faster to melt and form puddles of water that accelerate ice loss. These pools, without sufficient time to refreeze overnight, contribute to rising sea levels and diminish ice’s crucial role in reflecting sunlight back into the atmosphere. 

Jaafar El-Awady, PhD, a professor in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins, along with colleagues across the University, are pioneering an innovative solution: ice nucleation proteins. These microscopic catalysts occur naturally in certain organisms and can accelerate the freezing process of water. When placed in melt pools, they can speed up the freezing process overnight “such that we can reduce the melting during the day,” El-Awady says. His team also plans to weigh the feasibility of cloud seeding—“basically dispersing these ice nucleation proteins into clouds over glaciers to induce snowfall”—as a scalable means of application. 

Preserving ice coverage would reinforce Earth’s natural cooling mechanism and create a positive feedback loop: More ice means more reflected sunlight, further cooling the planet and slowing melt. “If we’re able to increase ice mass,” he says, “then you’re going to actually start reversing the process of global warming.”