Ocean Conservation & Tidalpunk

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A community to discuss news about our oceans & seas, marine conservation, sustainable aquatic tech, and anything related to Tidalpunk - the ocean-centric subgenre of Solarpunk.

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Geoengineers eye up ocean ‘dead zones’ for carbon storage (dialogue.earth)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It might be too cold for methanogens to be very active, but I suspect over time they will turn lose biomass into methane under these anaerobic conditions. Other bacteria further up in the water column will probably gobble it up and only CO2 will reach the surface, but the end result will be not more than a delay of the CO2 release by a few decades (as an optimistic assumption).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Life will find a way. Microbes seem to be very resilient in adapting to extreme conditions, and they seem able to do their thing (which for some is to produce methane) so long as they are not literally frozen. Rice agriculture has higher methane emissions than (all?) other crops due to the anaerobic soil conditions in the flooded fields, so intuitively, sinking a bunch of vegetable matter in the ocean would yield similar results. Even if the cold of the deep sea slows them down, those microbes will find a way to foil this geoengineering plan. A delay of a few decades is optimistic indeed.