14. The Soviet Plan to Melt the Arctic
Today, melting polar ice caps are a major concern, seeing as how the resultant rise in sea levels threatens low-lying coastal plains around the world where billions live. However, in the 1950s, when most people had never even heard of “global warming”, let alone understood its ramifications, things were pretty different. Back then, polar ice was seen by many not as something positive worth preserving, but as a negative, that should be gotten rid of, the sooner, the better. It was a view especially popular in the Soviet Union, a huge chunk of which lay under permafrost. That held up many economic development plans, so authorities explored plans to warm up the country. The plan that got the most traction was to melt the entire Arctic ice cap.
Soviet scientist Petr Mikhailovich Borisov proposed a 55-mile dam spanning the entire Bering Strait between the Soviet Far East and Alaska. Doing so would block cold Pacific Ocean currents from reaching the Arctic, while allowing the Atlantic Ocean’s warm Gulf Stream currents to circulate more freely. That would gradually melt the Arctic ice cap, until the North Pole was completely ice-free. The Soviet government found Borisov’s concept intriguing, and his idea even made waves in the West, where JFK called it “certainly worth exploring“. However, the plan fizzled out – not due to environmental concerns, but cost concerns, and the difficulty of securing the US-Soviet cooperation necessary to carry out such an ambitious geoengineering project.
