Our Mission
At Bright Ice Initiative, we aim to preserve glacial ice through respectful, localized, and low-impact strategies that enhance the reflectivity of ice and snow.
We’re dedicated to collaborating with Indigenous populations and local leaders, ensuring that our efforts benefit at-risk communities while honoring their knowledge and practices.
Our commitment to treading lightly and doing no harm guides every project we undertake in the fight against glacial ice melt.
Our Focus
Bright Ice Initiative is focused on increasing the reflectivity of ice to slow the disastrous impact of glacial melting. Working in regions of critical need, our approach is to codevelop and evaluate solutions with and for communities living under the greatest threat, offering hope to them and ultimately, to the planet.
We work in locations where we are invited to, and where we have partnerships with local authorities. Following the Oxford Principles, we actively seek to establish collaborations for co-development with Indigenous and local scientific communities who have expertise in the terrains being proposed as sites.
Our Approach
At Bright Ice Initiative, we’ve watched bright, reflective glacial ice be replaced with dirty ice and exposed rocks and soil. That’s why preserving glacial-ice reflectivity is our priority. Since glaciers are sloped—and Hollow Glass Microspheres (HGMs) are round—we needed a material that wouldn’t roll.
That’s why we’ve been testing a safe, clay-based material that stays in place AND has promise when it comes to brightening ice. We likely still have room for improvement, though our initial test in the Himalayas (November 2024) delivered better performance in keeping things brighter.
By preserving and restoring reflectivity to vital glacial regions, we reduce the pace of temperature rise (and potentially lessen sea level rise) while protecting ecosystems and species from catastrophic loss. These are tough challenges in the face of policies that often prioritize profit over planet, but we persevere and stay determined. Our support has grown significantly as we’ve increased our scope, collaborations, and solidly demonstrated results over the years. We continue our dedication to transparency through updates, open access publications, and authentic collaborations.
On a self-contained Minnesota pond, we used Hollow Glass Microspheres (HGMs) to brighten the surface of dirty ice and melt water, increasing the albedo. These tiny, bright bubbles are made using sand-based materials found in abundance throughout the earth’s ecosystems. This family of materials are used worldwide in many everyday commercial applications, including marine applications, and interestingly, highway markings, where the bubbles don’t break, even in heavy truck traffic. We’ve found that these highly-reflective spheres work very well in thin layers over flat areas. As seen below, the bubbles were spread by hand onto the pond’s glacier-like ice, and the testing was closely monitored by the homeowner and his local team.
In cooperation with the Icelandic Meteorological Office, we conducted testing on the Langjökull Glacier using clay-based reflective materials. Our team diligently measured ice and snow thickness, temperature, and albedo (reflectivity) throughout the melt season. The results showed that this approach was safe and effective—even on a melting sloped glacier.
Read more about our trip to Iceland here.
A note from our founder…
“In 2006, I shifted my work focus to finding an effective way to address the enormous challenges of climate change, out of deep concern for my children’s future. Watching An Inconvenient Truth was a wake-up call for me. I put “habitable planet” on my to-do list and got to work. Over the years, I’ve had support from amazing colleagues, volunteers, scientific experts, family, and friends. The work has evolved over time, but having a habitable planet, in which everyone and everything we love can thrive, is still the over-arching mission for me.”
- Dr. Leslie Field
Your support means the world—to all of us.
Donations are crucial to our progress—past, present and future. Your generous support is integral for sustaining our collaborative, international, scientifically-grounded efforts to develop practical solutions that meet the needs of the communities we work with.