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“The industry is getting ahead of the science,” says Isabella Arzeno-Soltero, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, who labored on the undertaking. “Our immediate goal was to see if, given optimal conditions, we can actually achieve the scales of carbon harvests that people are talking about. And the answer is no, not really.”
Seaweed pulls carbon dioxide from the environment by means of photosynthesis, after which a big quantity is sequestered—doubtlessly for millennia—when the plant matter ultimately sinks down into the ocean depths. The thought is that it might be grown after which deliberately sunk to lock away that carbon lengthy sufficient to ease the stress on the local weather.
Arzeno-Soltero and her colleagues on the University of California, Irvine, used a software program mannequin to estimate how a lot seaweed, of 4 differing kinds, might be grown in oceans around the globe.
The mannequin thought-about issues just like the seaweed’s nitrate uptake (which is important for progress), the water temperature, the solar’s depth, and peak of the ocean’s waves, utilizing international ocean knowledge gathered from previous years, whereas accounting for present farming practices. The researchers carried out greater than 1,000 seaweed progress and harvest simulations for every of the seaweed varieties, which they mentioned represented the “optimistic upper bounds” for seaweed manufacturing.
For instance, the brand new estimates assumed that farming house might be discovered inside the most efficient waters for seaweed within the equatorial Pacific, round 200 nautical miles off the coast. In much less productive areas, rising sufficient seaweed to achieve local weather targets could be much more difficult: thrice as a lot house must be dedicated to seaweed farming to sequester the identical quantity of carbon.