...the hub of taste-makers and cognoscenti of the art world.

But the OP didn't specify *which* Alpine conditions - he could be living on the Moon Alps.

I'd never heard of NI3 prior to your post, so I hit up Wikipedia, and found out this important fact: Nitrogen triiodide has no practical commercial value due to its extreme shock sensitivity, making it impossible to store, transport, and utilize for controlled explosions.

Pressurizing it in a squirt gun seems like a bad idea.

This.

I've tried the 'beating everyone to work' approach, and while those hours are productive, the lost hours of sleep and caffeine necessary to make that happen make me flit like a hummingbird through the afternoon and the extra productivity is ultimately wasted.

This only holds if the ice cap is floating at exactly surface level. If the ice cap happens to project above the surface of the water, then not so much.

Remember, the buoyant force is proportional to both the different densities (density of ice < density of water) and the different pressures being exerted on the object in the liquid (air pressure + g < water pressure + g). For small volumes (an ice cube) this is negligible, and ice floats at the surface level and as it melts, the water level decreases as the ice melts. For much larger volumes (icebergs, ice shelves, polar ice caps), the volume of ice above the surface of the liquid increases as a function of total volume of the ice: the larger the ice chunk is, less and less additional water needs to be displaced for it to float, and the overall volume of water level increases as that ice melts.