The Refreeze

The **Earth Climate Restoration Effort,** more commonly known as the **Refreeze,** was a geoengineering project to reverse the effect of Anthropological Climate Change on the Earth, that began in 2045. The Earth Working Group initiated the project in response to the disastrous effects of the Flood, which resulted in coastal flooding, heat-waves and drought, and more intense storm seasons. The EWG organized several projects under the Restoration Effort to reduce global greenhouse emissions, temperatures and sea-levels in the hopes of reaching environmental equilibrium, using techniques developed in the terraforming efforts on human colonies.

## History

### **Founding of the EWG**

In 2045, the Earth Working Group was founded by a consortium of businesses, smaller NGOs and private individuals aimed at repairing Earth's ecosystem. They believed that the same technology and skill used to terraform Mars and Venus could also be used at repairing Earth's biosphere.

### **Polar restoration**

In 2054 the EWG positioned Mars Solar Reflectors in Earth Polar Orbit in a geoengineering project to return global temperatures, and by extent sea and ice levels, to what they were in the year 2000. The solar reflectors functionally blocked out the sun from heating the Earth's poles, reducing temperatures sufficiently to return the polar caps to their pre-Anthropocene extent. Only the southern tip of the Greenland Ice Sheet could not be recovered, as it was a remnant of the North American Glacier of the last Ice Age. Rather, temperatures were low enough to keep snow on the ground.

### **Sahara Ecoregion Project**

The most ambitious geoengineering project of the EWG was the **Sahara Ecoregion Project** which sought to convert much of the Sahara desert into grasslands and forests for Carbon sequestration.

#### **Mega-lake restoration**

In 2047, the EWG began dredging out the ancient basins of the Sahara desert to serve as a series of inland seas, rivers, and lakes. Autonomous construction robots generated temporary dams and aqueducts to pump billions of tons of water into the new bodies of the Sahara. Other machines not only dredged the sand from the basins, but compacted them into harder floors when necessary to reduce erosion. However, the majority of the excavated Sand was compacted and sintered into tuff to build up hills and existing mountain ranges to provide wind-breaks and protected sources for reservoirs and glaciers to feed new river systems.

#### **Great Green Walls**

The leaders of the EWG believed that strategically planting trees would reduce wind velocity and lessen evaporation of moisture from the soil. By 2055, 800 million trees had been planted across the Sahara.

### **Aquifer restoration**

Climate change opened up new areas of farmland in the Northern Hemisphere that proved to be critical to maintaining global food production. However, it accelerated the depletion of the world's reservoirs. The Ogallala Aquifer had been nearly depleted by the middle of the century with recharge efforts unable to keep up with demand, while the Canadian aquifers had seen their use triple. Natural restoration would not be possible for another 6000 years, and thus the EWG initiated a long-term program to deposit fresh water into depleted aquifers and accelerate rainfall where possible. Local governments had already been attempting to recharge or at least slow the consumption of local aquifers for decades, and made additional efforts to import fresh water from northern sources where farming was still not practical.