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| 87 |  | Buoyant Flakes
Disseminating long-lived, ultra-slow-release, Buoyant Flakes carrying supplementary nutrients over the ocean surface mirrors what good farmers do on land. The flakes are made mainly from plentiful natural and waste materials using simple baking technology. They are designed to provide the iron, phosphate, silica and trace elements most needed by phytoplankton and seaweed to flourish. | View |
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| 87 | | Buoyant Flakes
Disseminating long-lived, ultra-slow-release, Buoyant Flakes carrying supplementary nutrients over the ocean surface mirrors what good farmers do on land. The flakes are made mainly from plentiful natural and waste materials using simple baking technology. They are designed to provide the iron, phosphate, silica and trace elements most needed by phytoplankton and seaweed to flourish. | View |
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| Short Description | Disseminating long-lived, ultra-slow-release, Buoyant Flakes carrying supplementary nutrients over the ocean surface mirrors what good farmers do on land. The flakes are made mainly from plentiful natural and waste materials using simple baking technology. They are designed to provide the iron, phosphate, silica and trace elements most needed by phytoplankton and seaweed to flourish. | | Description | Previous attempts to farm the sea or to increase oceanic carbon sequestration have used soluble, artificial chemicals that do not remain near the surface. However, long-lived, ultra-slow-release buoyant flakes can be disseminated pneumatically annually by ship over selected ocean areas. The tiny flakes are comprised of natural, organic materials and mineral wastes. Like a self-feed system, these do not so much release the nutrients to the environment, as to make them available at the sunlit sea surface where the phytoplankton which need them can 'suck' them out of the exposed mineral particles in the flakes using their transporter enzymes or ligands. Thus, there is little chance of either over-fertilisation, eutrophication, toxicity, or of the nutrients being lost rapidly to the dark depths. The foundation of each flake is a single rice husk, rich in the opaline silica needed by diatoms. Glued to this by plant-derived lignin hot-melt glue is a sealed matrix of air and minerals designed to provide phytoplankton communities with whatever nutrients are wanting in that part of the ocean. As dark blue ocean waters are deficient in one or more macronutrients or trace elements (typically phosphate, iron, silica and transition metals - reactive nitrogen nutrient being able to be made from air by cyanobacteria), using buoyant flakes could turn these blue or desert ocean regions into productive, turquoise seas. Krill and most other diel vertically migrating (DVM) species consume much phytoplankton in surface waters at night, then respire and excrete the carbonaceous wastes in the dark, safe depths of up to a kilometre deep during daylight hours, thereby sequestering its carbon content. | | Key Functions | Increases the biomass and biodiversity of marine life; sequesters atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) securely as carbonaceous seabed ooze & rock, refractory dissolved organic carbon (DOC), and benign, dissolved, alkaline bicarbonate; increases oceanic albedo (reflectiveness) that cools the surface waters; increases atmospheric DMS aerosols that nucleate or brighten cooling marine clouds. | | Innovation Dependencies | None known | | Quantification | BUOYANT FLAKE OCEAN FERTILIZATION (BFOF)
The dissemination of nutrient-bearing buoyant flakes over ocean surface waters that are deficient in one or more key nutrients in order to increase phytoplankton growth, ocean biomass and biodiversity is a method of climate improvement that has been long known. At Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in July 1988, John Martin stated humorously (but with serious intent) in a lecture his iron hypothesis: “give me a half a tanker of iron (scattered over ocean surface waters and absorbed by phytoplankton) and I will give you an ice age”. Now, our Buoyant Flakes will not only carry iron oxide waste, but also phosphatic clay waste, opaline silica (in rice husks) and micronutrients required by phytoplankton. The algae the flakes nutriate would also brighten the dark sea surface, nucleate solar-reflecting (cooling) marine cloud, increase marine biomass (fish, mollusc and crustacean stocks), and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide – at first in the euphotic (sunlit) zone, then by virtue mainly of diel vertically migrating (DVM) species, such as krill, lanternfish and bristlemouths, into the ocean depths where it would stay for up to millennia (depending on depth and location).
Now rice husk production is around 130Mt/yr and has little in the way of beneficial use. Rice husks contain ~17% silica. If 100Mt/yr of husk is made available for climate restoration use, and the husks are turned into buoyant flakes containing a mix of about 60% husk, 15% lignin glue, and 25% minerals that would make 167Mt/yr of flake. Now, the iron-rich red mud tailings from alumina refining contain about 47% iron, whilst Florida’s phosphatic clay wastes residual to phosphate extraction contain about 10% phosphorus. Hence, the rice husks would be adding 17Mt/yr of opaline silica to the surface ocean whilst, if each mineral were to be half of the 42Mt of minerals added to the husks, then each year we would be adding 10Mt of iron and 2Mt of phosphorus to the ocean surface, most of which would be taken up by living organisms. Furthermore, because the nutrients would mainly end up in oceanic biomass, they would tend to be recycled many times by the food chain and thus multiply oceanic biomass and its beneficial effects. 10Mt/yr of iron would fill many of Martin’s tankers, and would be disseminated thinly over most of the oligotrophic seas, not just the Southern Ocean.
Such nutrient supplementation would tend to render most dark blue seas into becoming a lighter, green or turquoise colour. The increase in albedo caused by this is not readily determined except by multi-spectral measurement by satellite over cloud-free areas, though an appreciation of its potential effectiveness might be gained simply from viewing photographs of algal blooms caused by blown dust or volcanic plumes. However, as algal blooms from over-zealous nutrient supplementation are to be avoided, the actual gain in albedo would be considerably less. Now, open ocean has an albedo of about 0.06, whilst green grass has one of 0.25. Omitting the important factors of cloud cover and cloud albedo, this means that turquoise waters nutriated by buoyant flakes might have an average daytime albedo of around 0.12, effectively doubling that of open, cloud-free ocean. The cooling effect of this in watts per square metre is to be determined, but is likely to be substantial.
Additional to this cooling effect would be that provided by the DMS emissions of the additional phytoplankton that would cause additional marine cloud nucleation and hence additional albedo.
Over the entire ocean such additional ocean biomass would result in an increase in carbon flow to the depths of the marine Biological Pump. This flow tends not to extend greatly to deep waters where the water is warm and well-oxygenated, because of bacterial action. However, in cooler waters, and particularly when facilitated by DVM species, the flow is likely to be considerable. It is thought that the DVM activity of the ~400Mt of Antarctic Krill, Euphausia superba, on its own is capable of sequestering large amounts of carbon as respired carbon dioxide or carbonaceous faeces, whilst it digests its nightly meal consumed near the sea surface, at depths of around a kilometre. Assuming that its average gut content is 5% of its bodyweight, that half of this gut content is water, and that half of that is carbon, this means that Antarctic krill could be sequestering 400 x 0.05 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 5MtC/day or some 18Mt of CO2 equivalent per day. Following long term Buoyant Flake supplementation over most of the global ocean, an expanded krill habitat, and sequestration by the other DVM species, might increase this sequestration rate several times over. | | Graphics: | | | (Click on image to enlarge it.) | | | (Click on image to enlarge it.) |  | | Technology | Effects | Projects |
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