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According to the article: "Whales facilitate carbon absorption in two ways. On the one hand, their movements — especially when diving — tend to push nutrients
by 0-_-0 7y ago
According to the article:
"Whales facilitate carbon absorption in two ways. On the one hand, their movements — especially when diving — tend to push nutrients from the bottom of the ocean to the surface, where they feed the phytoplankton and other marine flora that suck in carbon, as well as fish and other smaller animals."
I wonder if it would be possible to artificially create upwards currents in the ocean to push up nutrients, you could do the job of a million whales. Might be cheaper than planting forests...
- a_imho 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
- 0-_-0 7y agoThat's very interesting: "Martin's 1988 quip four months later at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, "Give me a half a tanker of iron and I will give you another ice age", drove a decade of research. "
- Etheryte 7y agoOceans are huge and human machines aren't anywhere near close to being as efficient as biological machines. It's an interesting idea, but I think we might see way easier wins by first simply stopping killing whales with everything else we're doing.
- todd8 7y agoIn the technical sense, Idon’t agree with your claim that “human [produced] machines aren’t anywhere near close to being as efficient as biological machines”. Perhaps you meant that sometimes the least costly way of performing work for some task involves utilizing a biological process. On the other, hand I do agree that we should stop killing whales (and perhaps there is now another reason to stop as well).
- samvher 7y agoThere are actually people exploring this. I saw a documentary at one point about passive ocean pumps (using wave energy) transporting water from lower layers upwards to increase plankton growth. It seems the company Atmocean is doing things like this and James Lovelock wrote a letter about it to Nature, I'm not sure if this is necessarily related to the docu I saw though.
- mhandley 7y agoThis is also one of the positive side effect of electricity generation from ocean thermal energy. I've wondered for a long time why we're not investing more in this, as it's one of the few possible large scale generation mechanisms that's actually carbon-negative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...