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Comment by knaq | Hacker News Reader

If we really wanted to stop it early, we could have. It's about the right size for a nuke.

(and no, an iceberg is NOT anything like a hurricane, which is a heat engine phenomena -- you can definitely shatter an iceberg)

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> you can definitely shatter an iceberg

Perhaps check out 'Seveneves' by Neal Stephenson for a (fictional) look at why shattering large things isn't always a good idea.

It covers over 4,000 sq km of ocean and sea floor. To disrupt that you'd need to pepper it with nukes.

So basically instead of letting an ice sheet disrupt the ecosystem across many thousands of square km, you think it would be better to nuke many thousands of square km of ecosystem. Huh.

Is the surface of an iceberg, properly called 'an ecosystem'? A doomed iceberg that is melting? Seems a stretch.

As you pointed out yourself [1], the iceberg is causing problems already by melting into the local ecosystem. A radioactive iceberg melting into the local ecosystem seems likely to be worse.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25495063

Nuclear bombs can be very clean these days. They've come a long way since the 1950's.

Do you really think nukes will only affect the ice? No effect on the ocean environment and sea floor beneath the berg? Surely to maximise the disruption of the ice sheet you'd need to explode the nukes underneath it. Otherwise you'll need to use more nukes, and even exploded on the surface they're still going to blast and cook a fair swathe of ocean and sea floor.

Nukes shouldn't be used for any reason. Fallout, destruction of animals in the vicinity, inadvertently triggering MAD, etc.

Trump recently asked if nukes could be used for disrupting hurricanes, and the answer was resoundingly no.

(Perhaps space-beamed microwaves, but there's an issue of scale and interaction with the ozone.)

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