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‘You look up and see light coming through’: The divers venturing under the ice in the name of science
It is a world cut off from our own by thick blankets of floating ice, but some scientists are taking the plunge to learn how these frozen depths are changing.
There is a 70cm-thick (28in) layer of ice capping the surface of this lake, in a remote corner of Lapland, northern Finland. Gathered around a hole cut into the ice is a group of around 20 people, peering down into the inky depths with some trepidation. The seemingly lifeless water below the ice has a temperature only slightly above 0C (32F). Some of them are about to jump down there to venture under the ice.
Sophie Kalkowski-Pope is one of the divers preparing visit this strange, upside-down world where she will swim below a ceiling of smooth ice. The marine biology graduate from the University of Queensland, Australia, is part of an ice-diving training party that has gathered here. She is wearing a dry suit and anticipating the initial cold shock when that frigid water will hit the exposed skin on her face.
It’s so numbing in these Arctic waters that, even with thermal clothing and special insulating gloves, divers find it hard to use their hands after just 30 minutes underwater. There are other dangers, too, so strict safety protocols are in place. Divers are tethered to the surface using a safety rope, with a handler on the surface communicating with the diver via rope signals. One tug for “ok”, two tugs for “stop”, three for “come back”.
A standby diver waits nearby in full gear, ready to enter the water if there’s an emergency. And there are two holes cut in the ice next to each other so there are two exit points.
The lines of rope linking divers back to the surface could become entangled in submerged branches or logs, other debris, or even the diver’s own equipment such as fins or tanks.
The training here on a frozen lake is practice for work that will be done out on the sea ice of the Arctic and Antarctic, where there are added dangers – large seals sometimes gather at the dive holes, preventing divers from leaving the water.
With one final check of her equipment, Kalkowski-Pope puts her breathing apparatus in her mouth – and flings herself in.
Those twinkling lights are like beacons that guide the divers back to the surface
Today, ice is still a key feature of the Arctic but it is becoming less and less common. Because of climate change, the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world. Satellite data reveals the area of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean has declined by around 13.2% per decade, on average, since monitoring began in 1979.
Scientists, driven to understand the changes unfolding here, are going to extremes to carry out their fieldwork. Some are learning ice diving techniques, so that they may observe underwater Arctic ecosystems and document the hastening retreat of the ice. Their short, and sometimes dangerous, expeditions are revealing the secrets of a rapidly thawing world.
“Once you get in the water, you realise what a beautiful environment you’re in and you calm down a bit,” says Kalkowski-Pope as she describes the natural trepidation that people have ahead of an ice dive.
She has come to Kilpisjärvi in Lapland, over 248 miles (400km) north of the Arctic Circle, to join other divers from all over the world on an ice diving training course. The trainees plod gingerly around two rectangular entry holes that they’ve cut in the lake’s ice.
It may be the middle of March but it still feels very much like winter here. The lake is frozen over and surrounded by Finland’s highest fells, still draped in thick snow.
Perry Brandes, a commercial diver from Florida, where he is used to a far warmer climate, has just completed his first ice dive. “It’s very peaceful,” he says. “You look up and see light coming through. It’s like looking at a city from afar.” This, he explains, is the sun peeking through holes in the ice above. Those twinkling lights are like beacons that guide the divers back to the surface. (You can read more about what it is like under the ice in Antarctica in Katherine Latham’s fascinating article about this upside down ice-scape.)
Kalkowski-Pope and Brandes are two of 12 participants on the week-long polar research diving course, which has been organised by the University of Helsinki.
All of those taking part are already seasoned divers who have honed their skills in temperate and tropical waters. This is the next level. Should they master ice diving here, it could enable them to join scientific diving expeditions in the Arctic or Antarctic.
“There’s probably only a few hundred people in the world who can do polar base diving work at the moment,” says Edd Stockdale, coordinator of the Finnish Scientific Diving Academy, who leads the course. “The polar areas are melting. We need scientists who are able to monitor what’s happening,” he explains.
Scientific research in the polar regions is critically important for climate change monitoring. The melting of polar ice contributes to rising sea levels around the world. By studying changes in sea ice, scientists are able to gain a better understanding of how quickly climate change is unfolding.
Ice diving, in particular, allows researchers to collect first-hand data on ice thickness, density and movement as well as water temperatures and salinity. The polar regions also have unique flora and fauna adapted to living in extremely cold conditions, and some of these organisms are visible during ice dives.
In 2017, Alf Norkko, a professor of marine research at the University of Helsinki, and his team discovered big changes on the seafloor under Antarctic sea ice since their previous diving expedition in the same area in 2009.
“There was a remarkable increase in the abundance of life,” he says. Levels of chlorophyll and other plant compounds deposited in the sediment on the sea floor had risen dramatically, indicating that the amount of plankton and algae in the water had increased. “In just a few years, the sea ice had got thinner, which allowed more light to get through so there was more food supply for starfish, worms, sponges and sea spiders on the seafloor.”
A recently published study of kelp forests off the coast of the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard saw divers make repeated trips to the same site over a 25 year period to examine how warming temperatures were affecting these important ecosystem by changing the mix of seaweed growing there.
Data collected by research divers from the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station also recently helped to show that the coastal seabed off the West Antarctic Peninsula is more frequently being struck by icebergs due to reductions in sea ice. These collisions cause catastrophic damage, killing almost everything in their path and scouring enormous scars along the seabed.
Norkko adds that it is helpful for scientists from many different fields to take part in the ice dives. “It’s not enough for a marine biologist to go down and count the starfish on the sea floor,” he says. “We need multidisciplinary teams with a chemist and a physicist to go down and connect the dots.” This enables researchers to more comprehensively describe the range of physical and biological processes that occur in these waters.
However, such fieldwork is risky. “It’s dangerous. You can’t make any mistakes,” warns Finnish explorer Pata Degerman, who also teaches on the course. “It’s like diving in a cave in a sense that the ice is a roof above your head. You can’t just go up anywhere you need to find an exit hole.”
Pre-dive, the trainees don special clothing to protect themselves from the extreme cold: thermal underwear beneath a dry suit, gloves, and a neoprene hood that covers their head and neck. Even so, they can’t stay in the water for long. Their hands lose dexterity quickly in the freezing conditions. Instructors say most divers can’t use their hands properly after about 30 minutes beneath the ice.
Your guideline is like a baby’s umbilical cord. You can see you’re connected and you feel safe – Perry Brandes
Divers on the training course descend into the water in pairs to a depth of 12m (39ft) while tethered to a safety line, which is standard procedure for ice diving. This safety line takes the form of a sturdy rope that physically connects divers to the surface. On the training course at Kilpisjärvi, each line is tended by one of the trainees, who is tasked with managing slack and making sure the line doesn’t get entangled.
“Your guideline is like a baby’s umbilical cord. You can see you’re connected and you feel safe,” says Brandes.
The safety line is also the only means of communication that divers have with their colleagues at the surface. Five minutes after entering the water, a diver will pull hard on the rope to signal that they are OK and that things are progressing as planned. The tender on the surface pulls their end of the cord to acknowledge the message. “This gets repeated every five minutes during the dive,” explains Degerman. “It’s very simple but it works.”
If there’s no reply, or the tenders feel that something is wrong, emergency procedures kick in. A diver is always waiting on standby at the surface, ready to attach themselves to the line and jump in to find out what’s going on. Once they reach the silent diver, they might need to give them air or even push them upwards and back out of the hole, adds Degerman.
Among the things that can go wrong are problems with regulators, the devices divers use to breathe while underwater. The moisture in a diver’s breath can actually freeze and cause the regulator to malfunction, says Degerman.
During the week-long course, there were a number of “free flows”, situations in which the regulator delivered air continuously at full flow, rather than in a controlled manner synchronized with a diver’s inhalations. These free flow events are more likely when diving in cold water as regulators can freeze more easily. When a diver inhales, the regulator reduces high-pressure air from the tank to ambient pressure. In freezing water, this can cause moisture in the regulator to form ice that can jam the valve open, leading to a continuous flow of air making it hard to breathe properly.
To remedy the problem, divers can switch over to their backup system. If that doesn’t work, they have to get the attention of their diving buddy so that they can begin sharing their air supply and return to the surface.
Ice divers don’t wear a full face mask because that would make it difficult to remove during a free flow incident. But this means they experience a significant cold shock upon entering the water.
“I’d never dived in cold water before,” says Kalkowski-Pope. “Going beneath the ice layer for the first time and feeling the cold water on my face was really unique.”
Despite the challenges of ice diving, Norkko says he’s never had an accident on any of his polar expeditions. He puts that down to preparedness, training, and assessing and managing risks carefully.
“People worry about different things but I think the biggest risk is dry suit flooding, especially in Antarctica,” he says. “We have salt water there that freezes less easily: it’s -2C (28F), which gives you a bad cold shock.”
Seals sometimes sit over dive holes, blocking a diver’s exit from the water. “You can’t get past a 300kg (47st) seal,” laughs Norkko. “That’s why we always have two holes.”
While there are clearly risks in doing this work, the chance to gather crucial data makes them worth taking, says Anni Makinen, who works as a scientific diver for an environmental consultancy in Finland: “I’d like to help to get some scientific knowledge that will influence politicians.”
Ice diving research projects still need willing humans like Makinen. While robots and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are increasingly important for scientific fieldwork, including in the Arctic, there are things that machines will never be able to do, stresses Rodd Budd from New Zealand’s National Institute of Atmospheric Research and coordinator of Antarctica New Zealand’s dive operations.
“An ROV can only see what’s directly in front of it, so it may go past something interesting,” he explains. In some cases wild animals such as seals or white whales have been used to collect data from under the ice by attaching sensors to them, but they can’t be controlled to go where researchers might want. Human divers, on the other hand, naturally take in a wider field of view and can adjust their explorations depending on what they deem most important to investigate.
Plus, humans are less intrusive, says Perry Brandes, the Floridian diver, who notes that ROVs create a lot of noise and shine powerful lights ahead of them. Human divers can be much less disruptive. “Many of the animals actually look at us divers,” adds Brandes. “There’s an interaction between us.”
Norkko says that he and his fellow scientists are so dedicated to this work because they are aware of the urgency of climate change. At present, there is a race afoot to understand it, and to respond to it.
“Climate change is progressing at such a rate that decisions are sometimes not made with the best available scientific knowledge. This is a problem. We need to keep science at the front,” says Norkko.
But there is also the alluring thrill of fieldwork like this. Going to places where few humans can, in order to document our planet a little better. That, too, says Norkko, keeps researchers like him returning to the dark world under the ice. “There is, of course, also an element of adventure that drives us.”
Taken From BBC News
Our lives are surprisingly dependent upon this extremely light and unreactive gas, yet supplies of it are remarkably fragile.
Nancy Washton remembers the sinking feeling she got when she heard her helium delivery wouldn’t be arriving. In early 2022, she and her team of chemists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the United States were abruptly told by their supplier that they wouldn’t get their usual shipment of the gas, which they use in a range of different experiments.
Shortages meant there wasn’t enough to go around, and the laboratory would simply have to make do with less. In the first weeks of that year, the laboratory’s supply dropped well below the 2,500 litres (660 gallons) it normally received. By April, just a couple of months later, it was getting less than half the helium it needed.
With a small fleet of instruments that require regular top-ups of liquid helium, the lab had no choice but to sacrifice the greediest of these in order to continue running the most important. Washton’s own instrument of choice was a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer – a huge, hulking tower, capable of peering into the molecular structure of atoms. Such measurements can contribute to the development of new batteries and energy storage systems, for example.
The spectrometer was the only one of its kind in North America, and less than 12 months after its installation it was providing results that were potentially game-changing. When turned on samples of magnesium oxide, for example, it showed the minerals are capable of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. Such “carbon mineralisation” has long been explored as a way of combatting greenhouse gas emissions, but the results showed how useful these minerals could be.
“There had been no definitive evidence of carbonate formations on these particular types of magnesium oxides [before],” says Washton. “I just could not believe the data. The fact that we had managed to get this data, and the beauty of the story it told, was just amazing,” Washton says.
But then all of that work abruptly had to stop.
You might not realise it, but many of the products and processes you encounter each day depend on helium
The rate at which the spectrometer consumed helium made it a problem. In a process Washton later described as “traumatising”, the instrument was de-energised and mothballed, its experiments suspended. It would sit inert and useless for several months until more helium could be secured. Today, the device is back up and running – the lab has the helium it needs. For the time being.
What is helium used for?
Helium is an inert gas, which means that it does not react readily with other substances. It has the lowest boiling point of any element at -269C (-452F) and a low density.
The space industry uses helium to keep satellite instruments cool and to clean out rocket engines. It is also used to pressurise the fuel tanks of space rockets.
Helium also cools equipment within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as well as the superconducting magnets in medical MRI scanners.
Helium is often used to fill party balloons, weather balloons and airships due to its low density.
Deep-sea divers rely on helium to control the proportions of oxygen and nitrogen they get from their breathing apparatus, since this helps to avoid decompression sickness.
The episode highlights how vulnerable helium supplies are and why there is now a desperate scramble around the world to find ways of conserving and recycling this crucial gas.
The shortages in 2022 didn’t just affect researchers. You might not realise it, but many of the products and processes you encounter each day depend on helium.
Hospitals, for example, are the world’s largest consumers of helium, accounting for around 32% of the global market. The gas is used to cool magnets in vital diagnostic tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. Helium is also used in the manufacturing of the semiconductors (computer chips), which are at the heart of electronic devices. It’s also used in welding and even pressurises the fuel tanks of rockets that put satellites into orbit. Plus, helium is part of the gas mixture that inflates car safety airbags.
Helium is odourless, extremely light and, unlike another very light element once used in airships, hydrogen, it will never burst into flames. When cooled, it only condenses into a liquid at the stunningly low temperature of roughly 4.2 Kelvin, or -269C/-452F. Plus, under normal atmospheric conditions, helium will not freeze even at temperatures as low as absolute zero, or 0 Kelvin (-273C/-460F). This makes it incredibly useful.
“Helium is a magical element,” says Sophia Hayes, professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. “There is nothing else like it in the Universe.”
Liquid helium takes on strange properties when it is chilled almost to absolute zero, turning into a superfluid that flows without friction. Stir a cup of superfluid helium and the liquid inside would theoretically keep spinning forever. Superfluid helium has become vital for large-scale superconductors, such as those used by the Large Hadron Collider experiment at Cern on the border between Switzerland and France.
But since 2006, helium has repeatedly been in short supply. The most recent extended shortage started in January 2022 before easing the following year. But helium supplies have remained precarious, with producers struggling to keep up with demand.
That demand is only expected to rise further – with some analysts predicting that it will double by 2035 due to helium’s key roles in semiconductor and electric vehicle battery manufacturing, as well as in aerospace applications.
There are only two sources of helium: the highly-energetic nuclear fusion reactions inside stars, including our Sun, and the slow decay radioactive elements in Earth’s crust. Since we can’t artificially manufacture helium with today’s technology, that means it is essentially a finite resource. Instead, helium is typically mined alongside natural gas by drilling deep wells into the ground, but only a handful of companies across the world currently do this.
Helium is also a remarkably uncooperative element. The extraction and burning of fossil fuels have caused increasing amounts of helium to build up in the Earth’s atmosphere in recent decades, depleting the resource otherwise locked inside our planet.
But helium is so light that it is also slowly leaking out of the Earth’s atmosphere and heading off into space. In its superfluid state, it has a habit of finding its way out of even the tiniest cracks and holes. It can even flow up walls in this superfluid state. That makes it difficult to handle and store – it can be easily lost after use.
All of this makes the helium supply chain fragile – resulting in four worldwide helium shortages in the last twenty years alone.
The most recent severe shortage in 2022 that scuppered some of Washton’s research occurred after a series of fires at a major Russian gas processing plant in the Amur region of Siberia. The war in Ukraine compounded the problem by further choking supplies at the same time a helium plant in Qatar went offline for planned maintenance. Meanwhile, the crude helium enrichment unit at the US National Helium Reserve was shut down during the summer of 2021 and again for four months at the end of January 2022. The US shutdown removed around 10% of the global production capacity of helium from the supply chain. Taken together, these incidents led to a sudden shortage and highlighted just how vulnerable the world’s helium supply could be. By 2023, the industrial sale price of helium had nearly doubled from what it was five years before, reaching an all-time high.
Although helium production has since increased, the world yet again faces potential disruption, leaving market prices volatile. In September 2024, the EU began enforcing new sanctions on Russia over its war in Ukraine, including banning imports of helium. While Russia accounts for only 1% of the EU’s helium imports, the move marked a further tightening of supplies. On top of that, the sale of the world’s largest helium reserve – the US Federal Helium Reserve – has triggered further uncertainty.
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For several decades, the US has supplied around one-tenth of the world’s helium from an underground federal stockpile established a century ago near Amarillo, Texas. But in June 2024, the Bureau of Land Management, which ran the US helium reserve, sold the last gasp of federal helium to the German gas supplier Messer. Ahead of the handover, the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine released a report warning that the sale of the strategic reserve to a commercial company could heighten uncertainty in the helium market.
Trade bodies including The Compressed Gas Association and the Advanced Medical Technology Association – AdvaMed – urged the US government to delay the sale on the grounds that it risked a “supply chain crisis”. And healthcare contractor Premier Inc, which sources helium on behalf of thousands of hospitals, suggested the sale could have a detrimental impact on patient care.
Although these fears are yet to be realised, there are signs that not all is going smoothly.
Within months of the sale, Messer was forced to request a temporary restraining order to prevent another shutdown of the crude helium enrichment unit – this was due to the expiry of a critical lease and a negotiation dispute. The company that ran the enrichment unit was later placed into receivership. Messer, however, says its helium system “has been operating reliably and without interruption since we acquired it last June, and we anticipate smooth uninterrupted operations in the future”.
But a recent analysis of helium supplies suggests that this natural resource is likely to take on growing geopolitical importance over the coming years as demand and competition for the gas increases.
The US accounts for about 46% of the global supply of helium, followed by Qatar (38%) and then Algeria (5%). If US supplies were to be disrupted again, the impact would be felt around the world.
Volatile supplies in recent years have reminded everyone just how exhaustible this precious resource is
Years of precarious helium supplies and price fluctuations, however, have also forced academic, commercial and clinical bodies to explore more sustainable modes of helium consumption. Firmly in their crosshairs are helium-hungry MRI machines.
A standard MRI machine requires a little under 2,000 litres of liquid helium to cool its superconducting magnets. Each unit needs occasional top-ups and, without the cooling helium, its magnets would heat up, evaporate the helium reservoir, and expel it in a process called “quenching”. It’s rare, but dire: the helium is lost, and another couple thousand litres of the liquid is required to put the machine back into working order. If a quenching incident causes more serious damage, then the whole MRI machine might need replacing at great expense.
Now, a new breed of MRI machines that require significantly less helium are emerging. Many of these low-helium units need as little as one litre of helium to operate, sealing it in a closed system. In recent years, these machines have already begun appearing in hospitals and research institutions.
But there are limits. These low-helium scanners are especially expensive, and it would still take many years to replace the more than 35,000 MRI machines that use superconductors worldwide.
The new scanners are also only capable of producing magnetic field strengths of around 1.5 Tesla – roughly half of what their beefier predecessors can put out. “Higher-field-strength scanners have the potential to scan in finer detail and/or faster than lower-field-strength scanners,” says Sharon Giles, director of clinical and research imaging operations at King’s College London. The use of these low-helium scanners, then, is limited, although Giles says they’re still capable of performing routine imaging in a lab setting.
Other researchers have searched for ways to cut out helium entirely by developing superconducting materials that don’t need to be cooled to such extremes.
More widely, researchers are starting to shore up their own supplies by recycling. Helium recovery systems can recapture evaporated helium that would otherwise be lost. “It will allow us to recover about 90% of the helium that we purchase every year,” says Nicholas Fitzkee, director of Mississippi State University’s nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) facility, which is in the process of installing a recovery system. “We did the calculations when we wrote the proposal and the total cost of the system was just over $300,000 (£238,000), and it should pay for itself within six years.”
But installing helium recovery technology – complicated arrangements of pipes, tubing and headers that must be fed through a facility’s instruments – is time-consuming and complex. These systems can fail, leak, and even when done right, Washton worries that some people may not fully appreciate their benefit. “To make an argument, ‘Hey, I need $600,000 (£476,000) for a couple of helium recovery units’, people are like, ‘Well, what’s that gonna do for us? That’s kind of like you’re putting in new plumbing’,” she says, explaining that such work doesn’t have the “bling” factor that helps justify certain other scientific investments.
But there may also be some signs of relief on the horizon. Qatar is on course to open a new helium plant by 2027, while other companies have started to look for previously untapped underground fields.
In 2016, the world’s largest helium reserve was found in Tanzania. It is set to start production in 2025. This was actually the first helium gas field to be discovered deliberately, and the launch of operations there will mark the first time helium has been recovered at scale, rather than as a by-product of polluting natural gas extraction. Major helium reserves have also been discovered in China’s Bohai Bay Basin.
Christopher Ballentine, chair of geochemistry at the University of Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences, contributed to the scientific research that ultimately helped to locate the Tanzanian helium deposit. But he cautions against over-excitement. “The challenge of finding significant helium deposits to meet the growing global demand requires significant finances and a long lead-in time,” he says.
Volatile supplies in recent years have reminded everyone just how exhaustible this precious resource is – and how quickly its supply can be pinched off.
Washton emphasises the risks: “Imagine if there’s just not enough helium, and your grandma can’t get her MRI because its superconductor is dead. This is serious and we need to deal with it.”
Taken From BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250331-why-helium-shortages-are-worrying-the-world
Pakistan Telecommunications Limited (PTCL) on Thursday told Dawn.com that there is no exact timeframe for the resolution of slow internet connectivity or the repair of the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) undersea internet cable.
Internet users across Pakistan complained of slow internet and hindered access to services throughout 2024.
On January 3, PTCL said teams were “diligently” working to resolve the matter of disruptions faced by users after a fault in the AAE-1 subsea internet cable connecting Pakistan slowed down the network speed in the country.
A day after that, IT minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja said around 80 per cent of the bandwidth shortfall caused by the fault had been recovered as traffic had been shifted to two other cables.
In today’s statement, PTCL spokesperson Aamir Pasha said that to address the slowdown, PTCL “added additional bandwidth which has majorly resolved [the] internet slowness issue”.
However, the telecom operator stated that slow internet speed might still be experienced on Meta-owned services, such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, especially during peak hours.
“We expect complete resolution over the next few days,” the statement added, without giving an exact timeframe.
“PTA and PTCL are working diligently to ensure the earliest possible resolution.”
Speaking to Dawn.com, Pasha said that the bandwidth shortfall had “been addressed”.
Meanwhile, PTCL technical personnel said that problems of this nature take between two and three months to fix.
Elon Musk’s electric carmaker Tesla has warned it and other US exporters could be harmed by countries retaliating to Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.
Mr Musk is a close ally of the US president and is leading efforts to reduce the size of the federal government.
But in an unsigned letter addressed to the US trade representative, Tesla said while it “supports” fair trade it was concerned US exporters were “exposed to disproportionate impacts” if other countries retaliated to tariffs.
The letter was dated the same day that Trump hosted an event at the White House where he promised to buy a Tesla in a show of support for Mr Musk.
It is unclear who at Tesla wrote the letter as it is unsigned, or if Mr Musk was aware of it.
Tesla’s share price has dropped 40% since the start of the year. Mr Musk is the carmaker’s chief executive and while some have argued his alignment with the Trump administration is hurting its brand, market analysts say the share fall is more about worries over Tesla meeting production targets and a drop in sales over the past year.
In the letter, Tesla said it was making changes to its supply chains to find as many local suppliers for its cars and batteries so it was less reliant on foreign markets.
“None the less,” it warned, “even with aggressive localisation of the supply chain, certain parts and components are difficult or impossible to source within the US.”
The US president has imposed an additional 20% tariff on all imports from China, prompting Beijing to respond with retaliatory levies including on cars. China is Tesla’s second biggest market after the US.
“For example, past trade actions by the United States have resulted in immediate reactions by the targeted countries, including increased tariffs on EVs imported into those countries,” the letter reads.
The EU and Canada have both threatened sweeping retaliations for tariffs on steel and aluminium imports into the US, which went into effect earlier this week.
Demonstrators have targeted Tesla showrooms in recent weeks in protest against Mr Musk’s cost-cutting role in Trump’s administration, where he is head of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
Earlier this week, Trump hosted an event at the White House where he said people protesting against Tesla should be labelled domestic terrorists, while sitting in the driver’s seat of a brand new red Tesla that he said he planned to buy.
Trump said demonstrators were “harming a great American company”, and anyone using violence against the electric carmaker would “go through hell”.
Taken From BBC News
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