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Story by insider@insider.com (Ellyn Lapointe)

 • 18h • 4 min read

• Geoengineers are planning to test massive underwater curtains that could slow catastrophic glacial melting.
• The Thwaites, a.k.a. “doomsday glacier,” has lost over 1,000 billion tons of ice since 2000.
• If the Thwaites collapsed entirely, global sea levels would ultimately rise by about 10 feet.

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Wildfires are getting worse. Check out the pitch deck that landed climate startup Vibrant Planet $15 million from backers like Microsoft to use AI to manage the risk.©Vibrant Planet

• Climate startup Vibrant Planet wants to help landowners manage wildfire risk.
• The startup has raised $15 million from Ecosystem Integrity Fund, with participation from Microsoft.
• Check out the 22-slide pitch deck it used to raise the Series A.

A California-based startup using artificial intelligence and machine learning for land management and climate-risk analysis has raised $15 million in Series A funding.

Vibrant Planet, which was founded in 2020, offers a data platform to help landowners figure out how to restore ecosystems and manage against the risk of wildfires.

Wildfires have long devastated communities around the world but increasing global temperatures have added fuel to the flame. Record heat in Europe stoked blazes; Canada experienced its worst wildfire season on record while Chile suffered its second. Lahaina, Maui was also engulfed in flames this summer. 

Along with rising temperatures, poor land planning and risk mitigation strategies are also to blame for raging wildfires, according to Vibrant Planet CEO Allison Wolff. Controlled or “good” fire could be one of the answers, she said. Controlled fire is a planned conflagration that can, for example, reduce dead leaves and limbs and prevent a wildfire from raging out of control.

Vibrant Planet maps forests in 3D, using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data and satellite data to generate recommendations based on priority, economical and ecological return, and risk-mitigation potential. Its management suggestions could include controlled fire, rewilding, or forest thinning, which also aids wildfire protection. 

“In about 53% of land on Earth, ecosystems are fire adapted,” added Wolff. “That means that’s how they cycle carbon, how they cycled nutrients, it’s how they regenerate. In a lot of coniferous forests worldwide, they only regenerate, they only reseed, when a fire rolls through and unlocks the seed from the pine cone – they’re totally adapted for fire.”

The issue today is that many historic forests were cut down for roads and buildings, while the use of fire for management fell out of favour. The result is trees that have grown back close together, often dominated by different species that are less fire adapted, Wolff said.

“So you get a bunch of fuel build-up. Lots of brush, down branches, and baby trees that would have been killed off because the forest sort of keeps the right number of trees per acre,” she said. 

As well as being fuel for wildfires, tightly packed trees fight for resources like water and sunlight and can become unhealthy and less disease-tolerant, she added. This is compounded by the stresses nature faces by climate change and rising temperatures. That’s why her company suggests, where appropriate, mechanically thinning trees and applying controlled fire as a solution. It is “pulling trees out to save forests,” she said. 

Wolff, formerly marketing head at Netflix and sustainability advisor to eBay and Google, cofounded the startup with spatial ecologist Scott Conway, Netflix’s former chief product officer Neil Hunt, and ex-Lyft and Meta data lead Guy Bayes. 

They are targeting everyone from private landowners, utilities, and indigenous tribes to NGOs, fire districts, and local and national governments as customers. 

The land management platform includes real-time scenario planning. Its monitoring capabilities mean it always knows how much carbon and water is in a forest to determine its health, Wolff said. It is also using predictive analytics to suggest uses for the material that is cleared from a forest, for example turning biomass into biochar for carbon sequestration. Much of the fresh fund will be used to expand its predictive analytics and climate risk models. 

It also wants to help customers rewild and increase biodiversity: Vibrant Planet’s scientists are currently mapping where beavers live and what habitats might work for them in the future. 

The cash injection, which brings the company’s total raised to $34 million, comes from Ecosystem Integrity Fund. Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Citi Ventures, Day One Ventures, SIG Climate, and Globivest also participated in the round. The startup has also secured grants from NASA and the USDA Smart Commodities Program. 

Check out the 22-slide redacted pitch deck below.See more

A couple feet of sea level rise may not sound like a lot. But if sea levels rose by 2 feet worldwide, the effects on coastal communities would be catastrophic.

Cities like New York, Miami, and New Orleans would experience devastating flooding. Across the globe, 97 million people would be in the path of rapidly encroaching waters, putting their homes, communities, and livelihoods at risk.

That’s what would happen if the Thwaites glacier, nicknamed the ‘doomsday glacier,’ collapsed. But it wouldn’t stop there.

Icebergs from the Ilulissat (Jakobshavn) Glacier melting in Disko Bay, Ilulissat, Greenland. Paul Souders/Getty Images© Paul Souders/Getty Images

Right now, this massive Antarctic ice shelf blocks warming sea waters from reaching other glaciers. If the Thwaites collapsed, it would trigger a cascade of melting that could raise sea levels another 10 feet.

Already, the melting Thwaites contributes to 4% of global sea level rise. Since 2000, the Thwaites has lost over 1,000 billion tons of ice. But it’s far from the only glacier in trouble, and we’re running out of time to save them.

That’s why geoengineers are innovating technologies that could slow glacial melting.

The latest strategy is curtains. That’s right — underwater curtains. John Moore, a glaciologist and geoengineering researcher at the University of Lapland, wants to install gigantic 62-mile-long underwater curtains to prevent warm seawater from reaching and melting glaciers.

But he needs $50 billion to make it happen.

Drawing the curtains on glacial melting

One of the main drivers of glacial melting is the flow of warm, salty sea water deep within the ocean. These warm currents lap against the sides of the Thwaites, for example, melting away the thick ice that keeps the shelf’s edge from collapsing.

As oceans warm due to climate change, these intruding currents will increasingly erode the Thwaites, driving it closer to total collapse.

Moore and his colleagues are trying to figure out if they could anchor curtains on the Amundsen seafloor to slow the melting.

In theory, these curtains would block the flow of warm currents to the Thwaites to halt melting and give its ice shelf time to re-thicken.

This diagram shows how a seabed anchored curtain could block the deep warm water currents from reaching glaciers. Arctic Centre / University of Lapland© Arctic Centre / University of Lapland

This isn’t the first time Moore has suggested this blocking solution. His curtain idea is based on a similar solution he proposed back in 2018, which would block warm water using a massive wall.

But curtains are a much safer option, according to Moore.

They’re just as effective at blocking warm currents, but much easier to remove if necessary, he explained.

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For instance, if the curtains took an unexpected toll on the local environment, they could be taken out and redesigned.

“Any intervention should be something that you can revert if you have second thoughts,” Moore said.

While Moore and his colleagues are still decades away from implementing this technology to save the Thwaites, they are in the middle of testing prototypes on a smaller scale.

A $50 billion idea

Moore’s colleagues at the University of Cambridge are already in the very early stages of developing and testing a prototype, and they could progress to the next stage as early as summer 2025, according to Moore.

Right now, researchers at the University of Cambridge are testing a 3-foot-long version of this technology inside tanks. Once they’ve proven its functionality, they’ll move on to testing it in the River Cam, either by installing it at the bottom of the river or by pulling it behind a boat, Moore said.

The River Cam, where University of Cambridge researchers plan to test their Sea Curtains prototype. Premier Photo/Shutterstock© Premier Photo/Shutterstock

The idea is to gradually scale up the prototypes until evidence suggests the technology is stable enough to install in the Antarctic, Moore explained.

If all goes well, they could be testing a set of 33-foot-long curtain prototypes in a Norwegian fjord in about two years.

“We want to know, what could possibly go wrong? And if there’s no solution for it, then in the end you just have to give up,” Moore said. “But there’s also a lot of incentive to try and make it work.”

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With scaling comes an increased need for funding. This year’s experiments will cost around $10,000. But to get to the point where Moore and his colleagues could confidently implement this technology, they’ll need about $10 million.

And they would need another $50 billion to actually install curtains in the Amundsen Sea.

“It sounds like a hell of a lot,” Moore said. “But compare the risk-risk: the cost of sea level protection around the world, just coastal defenses, is expected to be about $50 billion per year per meter of sea level rise.”

This map shows the amount of area in and around New York City that would become submerged if sea levels rose three feet (in red). Climate Central / Google Earth Engine© Climate Central / Google Earth Engine

While some coastal cities, like New York, have the budget to adapt to rising seas, others won’t even come close.

“One of the great driving forces for us is this social justice point — that it’s a much more equitable way of dealing with sea level rise than just saying, ‘We should be spending this money on adaptation,'” Moore said.

A race against time

Data shows that the Thwaites glacier, and others like it, are melting at unprecedented rates due to climate change. But the question of when they could collapse remains up for debate among glaciologists.

“We really don’t know if [the Thwaites] could collapse tomorrow, or 10 years from now, or 50 years from now,” said Moore. Adding, “We need to collect better data.”

Satellite imagery shows the extent of damage to the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, and the tearing apart of their shear zones. Lhermitte et al/PNAS© Lhermitte et al/PNAS

But collecting better data will take time that these glaciers might not have.

Proponents of glacial geoengineering, like Moore, believe that the time for intervention is now. Other experts disagree, arguing that cutting carbon emissions is the only viable way to slow glacial melting.

While reducing emissions is essential for mitigating the effects of climate change, Moore isn’t confident that we’ll cut back drastically or quickly enough to save the Thwaites. Once it reaches a tipping point, “Then the glacier doesn’t really care anymore about what humans want to do about their emissions,” he said.

“At that point, that’s when you need these other tools in the box.”