The historic heat wave that’s smothered western Europe this summer has caused transportation chaos. Railroad tracks warped, airport runways failed and key roads buckled.
Most if not all the ways global warming has changed the climate are having a deleterious effect on roads everywhere.
And a paper published in 2020 warned that those responsible for building and maintaining roads in permafrost areas in China face “significant engineering challenges.” Huge cracks are already appearing in the roads, making them unusable. Prevention—as is so often the case—would be the cheaper route. In Canada, for example, selecting base materials and road structures to withstand the climate decades into the future could reduce costs by over 90%, saving as much as $4.1 billion annually by the 2050s.
The only solution it seems—short of billions of delivery drones, flying trucks and teleportation—is to fix the way roads are made. There are indeed many bitumen blends, each with their own unique characteristics. Depending on how it’s formulated, polymer-modified bitumen can make an asphalt road more resistant to deformation so it won’t rut at increasingly higher temperatures. But local officials in most places have been using historical data to guide their bitumen recipes, and they haven’t kept pace with the reality of a warming climate.
Roads vulnerable to flooding can also benefit from such new strategies. Engineers in Australia have been trying to stabilize the materials inside asphalt. More than 1,000 kilometers of road across Queensland have been constructed with foamed bitumen, where air and water are injected into bitumen at high pressure. When the foam mixes with the other asphalt components, it produces a water-resistant layer.
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