The ocean plays a critical role in curbing climate change by naturally recycling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a massive scale. A Canadian startup is attempting to harness and accelerate that potential by adding antacid powder to the ocean.
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — Just over a year ago, Canadian oceanographer Will Burt was in Fairbanks, Alaska, teaching college students about the effects of global warming on marine life when a former colleague approached him about a startup seeking to use the ocean to remove carbon from the atmosphere.Eight months later, Burt was on a fishing boat off the shores of Nova Scotia, running experiments with a group of researchers as part of a moonshot effort to curb climate change.
The theory goes that by altering seawater chemistry, the ocean’s surface could absorb far more atmospheric carbon than it does naturally. “If we want to make fully informed decisions about the future of our ocean and climate, we need to complete some very critical research in the next decade,” Scott Doney,In the race to get there, Planetary Technologies has company.
“You can spend your whole career studying how much the ocean is going to acidify, but at some point you want to start thinking about how you avoid that, rather than just sitting and watching the ship sink,” Rau said. “People, for better or worse, perceive the oceans as pristine, and they’re going to have some serious concerns about interventions of this nature,” said Burns, referring to a fear in the scientific community that any negative affects or public distrust of one ocean-based carbon capture method could create backlash against all other approaches.
“Every organism that you see in the ocean, whether it’s an orca or a fish, a starfish, a lobster, whatever — it eats something that ate something that ate the phytoplankton,” MacIntyre, a professor at Dalhousie University, said. “Ultimately, the question is, at what point are you confident enough that there’s not a problem?” he said.
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