Growing back Ice, in the Arctic? | Fonger Ypma | TEDxAmsterdam

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Arctic Sea Ice is rapidly declining, and the Arctic sea is expected to experience ice-free summers as early as the thirties. This will further accelerate the climate crisis and start a series of devastating feedbacks, since the Arctic sea ice functions as the earth’s refrigerator by reflecting the sun’s heat back into space.

What if we could preserve the Arctic ice as heat shield by thickening the ice in winter through pumping sea water on top of it in strategically chosen locations across the Arctic Sea? Fonger Ypma is a cleantech entrepreneur, who recently founded Arctic Reflections, with the moonshot mission to restore Arctic Sea Ice to counter global warming.
After obtaining a PhD in Mathematical Physics from Oxford University, Fonger worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company for several years. From there, he moved to Eneco, a Dutch sustainable energy company, to be part of a newly formed unit on Innovation & Corporate Venturing. At Eneco, he led the innovation team, and founded a cross-company programme on data science and AI.
As an experienced leader in the energy transition, he co-founded a start-up aimed at datacentre waste heat reuse, and was CEO of a housing market data analytics scale-up. Initially starting his Arctic ice initiative as a side project with the Technical University of Delft, he is now fulltime dedicated to this endeavour. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx