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| 00:00 | for clive he's okay there we are and uh john will allow some sharing as well how come we've got you being called clive john ah because i've got clive's accounts today right so it's funnier i joined the conference last night and i realized i was clive on that too so it didn't look like me but it had my name on it yeah i might better get my zoom back again after this we might be both doubling up anyway is hugh going to be joining us or not do we know yes he's meant to be actually hosting this yeah uh |
| 00:46 | so we'll wait a moment for that and he'll he'll drive it uh let's see meeting settings who's this share screen i'll share screen for everyone perhaps chris would uh introduce himself yep uh chris vivian i used to work for cfas the government uk government marine science fisheries agency and i was involved with the london convention london protocol for uh 27 odd years i think um and was very actively involved in all the negotiations that led to the amendment to the london protocol for marine geo engineering and |
| 01:30 | i actually chaired the working group that finalized the that uh amendment and he would have been with brew when he made his first uh uh presentation on boy and flakes way back in uh in 2015 i think that's right that's right yeah there was the we had a one day special thing on marine geo engineering that's right and i've also been um the co-chair of the exam working group or means your engineering since i think it was started i think 2016 we first met um so i'm still carry on with that and we produced a report in 2019 that some |
| 02:07 | of you may have seen you'd know phil boyd very well chris oh yeah he's my co-chair yes very good down in hobart yes we've met him a number of times i'm in melbourne so i've had a number of chats with him yep that's excellent that's a great great guideline gazamp protocols yeah a lot of a lot of work there yeah and yes so we've got uh we're still just waiting for hugh um we'll wait a minute for him because he's gonna he's gonna host it uh we're recording now but that's okay |
| 02:42 | we can chat amongst ourselves yeah have you got a presentation to uh put up uh seth was that uh no the the one i sent round to all the all the members is is it's meant to be read it's not your presentation you're meant to only have you know no more than three lines and and one or two sentences for each my my ones tend to be you read it first and you come in with a q a yeah very good okay hi q hi you hear us there hugh there's you he's firing up still he's also changed his name he's now hugh hunt maine |
| 03:28 | yes promotion that's right this is better to be maine than second very good i think he's having trouble with the audio still although it looks like it's switched on you hearing us there here no yes not sure if he's even seeing us no that's right that great mind cambridge is a bit bit behind isn't it ah good morning friends hi good afternoon i'm brian hi there all right does everyone know chris as well joined us today i know friends and um uh stephen i've met you for some reason i can't hear anything i don't know why |
| 04:31 | can can someone put their hand up if you can hear me i can hear you okay i can't hear any of you i'm gonna exit and re-enter well perhaps we'll we'll we'll kick off while you try and sort that out there hugh and uh the main agenda today is is looking at the service innovations uh but are there any issues we want to put on the list before we talk to was that you oh you know someone's got some background there is it yep so but perhaps we we kick off with um with your work uh sev is that the best |
| 05:36 | way to play this would you like like to explain some of them well normally we we start with uh working out an agenda yes and then i think we should talk a little bit about what what what of us are going to do anything at cop26 and then we might get onto my stuff right i don't want to be the the queen bee of this this thing it's meant to be a collective when we got you back uh perhaps we could just touch base about a seminar tomorrow i think in that uh at cambridge is that going to be a uh an open seminar or zoom type thing or |
| 06:31 | is is there any online facility i certainly got an invitation to it although they may not be able to make it it has been advertised online quite widely so i assume it's open um yeah so but can you log into it uh is there's a webinar or yeah yeah yeah right it's mainly concerned with the uh getting rid of atmospheric methane i understand so maybe france could give a little bit of uh of information on that if if he's attending the link in the chat i i can tell you something about the chemistry here in the atmosphere |
| 07:22 | uh it's uh it depends on on the iron when when iron gets the sun radiation it goes from iron three to iron two it catches and it catches an electron and if chlorine chloride is partner of iron uh this electron is catched by by from from the chlorine from the chloride and chloride goes to atomic chlorine atomic chlorine is a more has more affinity to the gas phase and leaves the particle or the droplet in the guest phase it meets uh methane and reacts with me saying we send gets to uh |
| 08:27 | uh miss missile radical and uh chlorine atom uh uh gets to hcl hcl is has great affinity to the aqueous phase and goes back to the particle or droplet that's the whole story and how fast can a single iron chloride salt particle how quickly does that react with methanes a thousand times the second or minute or what oh i normally uh me saying in the atmosphere it disappears because of oxidation by o-h radicals and chlorine makes this reaction |
| 09:32 | 16 times 16 times faster than o h radical so and that is you know how part that is how many methane molecules are likely to be destroyed in a given time do you know what that figure is i i understand it might be in the thousands but i'm i i want to defer don't ask me don't ask me for for that mathematical right but it i i believe it's it it's it's surprisingly fast and can get rid of methane certainly on the experiment which peter furkowski did in a few minutes it was able to reduce the methane |
| 10:19 | concentration in his little reactor by about two-thirds which is amazingly fast yeah but we in the in the environment we have not such a concentration a high level of iron free but look in the in the past in the natural past in the uh glacial times uh always when when a lot of dust has been in the atmosphere the temperature went down by uh reducing the uh greenhouse gases methane and iron another iron mesa and co2 they they go parallel down while the temperature |
| 11:22 | is also going down always when when the dust is in the in the atmosphere right that gives a good answer do you have a sense for um how many methane molecules can be oxidized for every iron per unit time they they it it depends on the surface of the aerosols and on the uh uh on the time they are in the atmosphere if you have thick particles there will be not so much then very fine particles which stay for weeks in the atmosphere yeah it's what's the time scale for the iron to go from iron uh two back to iron three uh after the photo reaction the d |
| 12:20 | excitation um this iron ii is a very fast re-oxidized by by normal atmospheric oxidants and when the hcl returns to the water molecule water drop does it then need to go back to the iron before it gets re-emitted or can it be re-emitted to the gas phase immediately hcl has great efficiency to the aqueous phase and it reacts there with the re-oxidized iron which which has an uh a mix of chlorine and uh hydroxide okay fec cl2 oh for instance the limitation is probably the iron residence time in the atmosphere number of days and the speed of the cycle be |
| 13:23 | interesting to see what the rate limiting constant is good how do we work that out well i think you have to compare the time scale of deoxynate excitement the time scale for uh insertion into the atmosphere the time scale for interaction with the methane molecule and the time scale for reabsorption of the hcl back in one of those rate constants will be limiting um so how do we what experiments need to be done to work that out i think we do we do the rate constant measurement for each of the phases of the cycle and that will determine the |
| 13:57 | catalytic rate of reaction but does that happen if there are any losses as a sort of lab-based experiment in a in a small scale or does it have to be outdone outdoors i think you could recreate the environmental conditions indoors without difficulty i think peter did an experiment in his backyard and maybe do something in the desert uh in the near term so um you know i think those rate constants um we could determine some analytically with france's help and then some of them we could if we don't know have good |
| 14:30 | error bars we could test those in the laboratory matthew johnson from the university of copenhagen will be giving us an update in the cc rc uh seminar from cambridge is coming up so that'll be interesting he's been working in these in the smog chamber doing experiments on this so it'd be good to get an update from him uh in this methane removal seminar chris could you yes that's right no whether the whether it's going to have any london protocol implications and and how you would think the authorities might |
| 15:08 | regard um atmospheric release of iron chloride in particles um well certainly as regards what goes on in the atmosphere it's outside their remit um but clearly some of these this stuff is going to deposit on the ocean once it's done its thing in the atmosphere and it gets rained out or however else it whether deposits dry or wet it's going to end up on the ocean surface as to whether it might fall within the remit it's rather depends on whether there is um some concern about effects that might ensue |
| 15:51 | there is a sort of precedent from the past where there used to be a marine incineration of noxious organic substances in marine incineration vessels at sea they burnt all sorts of organic chlorines and um various other things of that sort that happened in europe and there was a site in the north sea that was used by the uk germany netherlands amongst others it was also done in the us in i think the gulf of mexico mainly but possibly in the atlantic as well and that was regulated under the london convention at the time because of the |
| 16:31 | deposition on the sea surface as a result of these activities now whether they would pick that up i don't know can i clarify something there because as far as i understand it and dan badansky who some of you may know has been very um has been very uh vocal about this the london protocol is is all about um dumping of wastes at sea it was is that the case that it was is it has it changed well the the the marine gear engineering amendment and in fact before that the amendment that took him to placing carbon dioxide in sub-sea |
| 17:11 | geological formations have extended the remiss of the protocol beyond what would traditionally be called dumping so it's no longer just dumping that's certainly the case keep in mind the nx4 of the london protocol is regards to placement of matter in the ocean so technically they do frame it in that context it is placement of matter but matter uh that you can regard placement of matter on the sea surface as falling within that definition if that's uh how you want to uh deal with it um it'll matter also bear |
| 17:45 | in mind can include structures it's not just substances i agree completely um and you know i think there is another framing of this and that is catalytic conversion for pollution reduction and if it's framed as catalytic conversion um then that's fine for methane but what we're talking about when it gets in the ocean is not methane we're talking about having an iron fertilization effect and that's where the difference lies agreed yes yes franz one other question is what other cations other than iron have this nice |
| 18:24 | dual valence uh property under uv that might be interesting from a catalytic standpoint it is not only a uv it's all also visible light which activates our which other category which other cations other than iron might have similar electrical chemicals there are a number of transition metals that have more than one oxidation state although i wouldn't necessarily recommend them all things like chromium which of course you'll have quite a bit of toxicity yes but the iron has been used as a photographic substance |
| 19:09 | the so-called platinum tp it was before the server photography uh arose okay it came out of use because uh preston is a little uh is uh it's more expensive than silver but the pictures were excellent and didn't get yellow or brown like a silver nice you said it was platinum uh instead in prison they used president to to develop the the pictures there where iron two had been developed platinum became reduced and uh made a black color very nice so how are we |
| 20:15 | how are we structuring tonight's meeting well what about getting the agenda as we normally do and then talking a little bit about what any of us are doing for cop26 and then maybe go on to my stuff so i'd rather hear from seb first if if if that's all right let's go for it off you go okay well um hopefully many of you read that little powerpoint thing i sent you what what it is is we've got a problem with [Music] trying to get carbon out of the atmosphere and we've got another problem with um |
| 21:04 | there being too much plastic waste in the ocean both can be solved by using a a thing called a win-wick drill hole reactor which is basically a long double tube tube within a tube going a couple of kilometers up to into into the sea bed it it's it's in fact called a gravity world reactor and you if you put say a uh a slurry of seaweed down the outer tube you heat that as well at the same time when it gets to high pressures something like a 150 200 atmospheres and a certain minimum temperature which is probably about 150 degrees celsius but |
| 22:01 | it can go as high as 250 the the carbohydrate or the plastic um uh turns into char and it releases the um the minerals and the nutrients the phosphate the uh ammonia the the the salts etc that then comes up the central tube and you can separate them centrifugally simply by putting some veins to spin the upflowing liquid and therefore for no energy expenditure in pressurization because that's done for free by gravity and with only a little bit of of a pipe resistance if particularly if the pipes are large you can actually carbonize |
| 23:02 | pretty much any carbonaceous material into a char which can be used for industry or other purposes or more likely simply let it sink by density down to the seabed where it'll stay there for probably millions of years the the heating is probably best done using one a a a small portable compartmentalized nuclear reactor like a thorium reactor or a company called starcore has these uh modular reactors which are particularly safe and particularly can't be used for nefarious purposes i was looking up their website and i |
| 23:57 | couldn't tell i thought they might have gone bust no you've got to go for starcore nuclear otherwise you can end up with other other star cores yeah but i know the people so um no they're not burst um a company called critic has been supporting them um and they're in very advanced negotiations to build um a reactor for the egyptians at the moment um they've also made some good progress in canada um i i can dig out and send anybody more detailed information if you wanted but um it's it's one of the better small |
| 24:35 | modular nuclear reactor designs around that uh i've tracked down so far um and actually there's a gentleman called david poole i can introduce you to who's the um if you can put reactors into submarines and sell it to the australians then why can't you really well put it in the yeah exactly we're talking about a small small one used by typically i i think that some of these small island nations which are in danger of inundation might like to keep their toe hold on whatever islands are disappearing |
| 25:16 | but also have in the deep water near them have this this floating installation which could be come the base of a a village uh community industrial effort uh harvesting the uh the sargassum nearby or harvesting the the uh the kelp from mid-ocean uh kelp farms and and brian has got some information on that i think um using some of the kelp you know there's there's little animal life on the kelp so you might want to use that to help feed your people uh you can grab the um you know seaweed is also quite useful for |
| 26:03 | uh human food and for uh feeding things like um marine bivalves and cattle and things like that and also can be used the excess or the bad stuff can be used to just make char and the good thing about it is you're releasing all the nutrients and the ships or the vessels which are bringing in these seaweed can on the return journey out to wherever your seaweed farm or patches can take with it the liquid fertilizers needed to grow more kelp or more sargassum so it's a beautiful circular motion and you're |
| 26:49 | losing very little of the fertilizer you can also use my buoyant flakes to add to the fertilizer if there isn't enough in the you know upper upper reaches of the of the mid-pacific and the these um these installations could grow basically using some of the plastic which they capture and they're basically ocean garbage collectors they they capture the plastic they sort it into what's reusable and good and what's junk the junk they put down the the drill hole reactor which turns into char and the the |
| 27:32 | good things they can make new products for and increase the size of their their floating base and i reckon that some of the developed nations have already done work on building floating cities and underwater habitats and i reckon that these could be used to make viable villages and industrial enterprises for um refugees [Music] where is some have any uh these gravity well reactors is that the right name yep i have any um experiments being done with these at scale yes yes a lot of them the dutch have done much of it in the americans the dutch were using it to |
| 28:29 | destroy hazardous medical waste it's also been used to turn sewage into biofuels biogas uh and and other other good things if you if you google gravity world reactors you'll find there's about 40 or 50 patents with them and quite a lot of countries have done experiments with them i i call it a win-win two kilometer scale yeah just an example it sounds very similar to something that ici patented many years ago called the deep shaft process for treating sewage when they put a deep um uh double tube effectively as you |
| 29:23 | described down for quite know the depth but couple hundred meters i think of that order and i know there's one of those or several of those operating in the uk and have been for some time in fact one not very far away from where i live in uh essex um at uh i think it's either candy island or somewhere around there um there's one of these operating for sewage works to treat the sewage because that extra pressure and temperature breaks down the sewage much more rapidly that would otherwise occur so you uh |
| 29:54 | eliminate the problem for this from sewage so how do they how does that one get the temperature it's just by the heat of reaction the the the pressure um and the the reaction of the temperature i think comes from the breakdown of the organics because i think the water is moderately warm to begin with because sewage water is not cold it's actually quite warm to begin with and the breakdown of the organics provides more heat and the the the high pressure drives it as well there's no addition where are these where are these |
| 30:32 | operating they're certainly used at some sewage works in the uk canbe island i think it's one it's canby or somewhere around that part of essex the deep shaft process though was originally developed i think for industrial waste rather than sewage but essentially it's a way of breaking down organic material in particular through high pressure and which temperature they break down i don't know what the temperature is i can't remember it's a long time since i ever was involved but it's |
| 31:05 | okay yeah htl generally operates at about 300 degrees yeah 300. 150. in principle you can use with ocean ridges there's lots of temperature and it's got the required pressure at a depth of two kilometers but that's a a a very difficult environment but what about hydrothermal vents and they're nice and hot but this this gets complicated because if i understand it correctly sir this is effectively a wet paralysis process and you can use it to generate fuel gases and you can use those gases to create |
| 31:53 | your temperature at the top and heat the water the sludge as you send it down yes and you can get more if you add um micro bubbles of air which will um decavitate and the oxygen content will of course react with the with the carbon giving you more heat and the adiabatic compression also increases the temperature yeah which is why you want to go down to two kilometers or so so you get the real um effect on those micro bubbles and the cavitation with it i don't think you'll actually fault for the uh the biochar generation you can |
| 32:33 | probably probably uh uh just a kilometer down will do that that's probably going to give you enough enough pressure right presumably the uh the energy required to then harvest the biochar and distribute it and put it you know use it for fertilizing land would be exorbitant the best thing to do would be to try and make it sink well it sinks by density so yeah you don't have to do anything just let it let it go if if you want if you really want to try and um make it simple then you want to try and do it somewhere |
| 33:11 | where it'll sink somewhere safe yes so where does that fit with the london protocol no idea really off the top of my head i'm not fully got my head around the idea but um it's certainly novel and um i suspect there may be issues um not something i could easily think about off the top of my head but if you're going to be releasing a lot of material particularly high in nutrients um at some part the ocean that would raise concern certainly but you're actually not adding anything to the ocean you're simply taking something in the |
| 33:55 | ocean and transforming it to something else but you're putting it somewhere else in the ocean not where it was originally well the plastic also things uh and and i i think the most people would would be happy to change uh uh dangerous hazardous plastic floating on the ocean near the ocean surface for benign biochar on on on that is a question in itself though because do we know it is benign anyway and the other thing is even if it's benign chemically uh if you're going to do this on scale you're going to produce a lot of mass of |
| 34:33 | material and despite what many people think the bottom of the ocean is not dead it's a long way away from that there's a lot of life down there and um there's a quite a lot of interest these days in conservation of the deep sea a bit and we still don't know an awful lot about it frankly uh as people can't constantly say we know more at the back side of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean so we're going to talk about conservation we need to talk about the decimation of life in the ocean over the |
| 35:04 | past century the baseline is daunting for example we can measure in the subtropical and tropical oceans some decrease a primary production of around 40 which means 40 percent less food getting to the seafloor in large abyssal ocean regions or since 1960 is supported by papers by lee and others from nature september 2020 so this stratification of the ocean that is happening today under business as usual is a first order problem that we need to address and if we want to get back to healthy climate in pre-industrial times then we |
| 35:42 | need to recognize the decimation of fish at the top end and primary production at the bottom end and address these fundamental nutrient value chain gaps that are occurring as a result of anthropogenic climate warming uh brian your baseline is an issue there surely because if you look back at fisheries records and such like and that baseline ought to be about 300 years ago i agreed and probably 500 if you include 500 yeah that means yeah um yeah the the problem with fisheries i think is that people look at it over a too |
| 36:19 | short time scale i used to work for a local authority fisheries organization in the uk uh which originally was set up in 1892 and that was set up at that time because the concern with the motor fishing vessels were coming along and decimating the fisheries which at that time were a hell of a lot richer than they are now and the fisherman's sort of perception is like probably about 30-year time scale or something like that and they just don't realize of how far down the track we've moved since uh and as you say it's |
| 36:50 | probably the best part of 300 years rather than just the last hundred or so certainly back to the early 1800s at the very least okay it's interesting to read captain cook's log which is available online and some of the descriptions the amount of life seeing in the scene different places they went to and other early explorers but it was totally different the other classic is um pre-war even in the north sea the herring fishery the the nets were supposed to be so dense you could just about walk across the sea because there |
| 37:21 | were so many uh drift nets out there there was vast numbers yes and so i think having this common goal of regenerating healthy ecosystems in the sea as modeled by perhaps kelp forest ecosystems and large sardine fisheries these kind of regenerative processes are something that we've been encouraging at climate foundation for close to a dozen years and i think you know using natural ecosystems as a model is a great way to discuss regeneration of healthy ecosystems in the sea and i think framed in that context a lot of |
| 37:58 | progress can be made by focusing actually not just on protection and not just conservation because you know if you close the barn doors after all the animals have left the barn have we really done any good we need we have to really discuss um regeneration and uh fortunately paul hawkins book came out this week and i encourage you all to check out the c4 station section yeah but uh the only caveat i would say is you still have to be careful that what you do doesn't make things worse because we may well be trying to do all these |
| 38:25 | things for the best reasons but we may inadvertently call side effects if we're not very careful about researching exactly what we're doing i agree completely but we do need to cite to rio section 15 which is that we cannot let scientific uncertainty be a cause for inaction because we've had 30 years of inaction and we can see exactly what that's gotten us since nineteen ninety sure i would frame it the other way around i'd suggest the precautionary principle says we should be doing something |
| 38:53 | yes it's very nice exactly i'd like to understand that line of reasoning because it's used so often to say do not when in doubt do nothing but how does it work the other way well it's just that climate change if you take climate change as an example the main thing i'm thinking of you know um inaction is not going to solve anything uh on the contrary it's going to let things get worse so therefore i would say to take a precautionary approach means we actually got to do something carefully properly yes but not just |
| 39:22 | in action i love that so we'll have to work to to frame that properly thank you chris i mean that's the kind of the um when you when you're when you're trying to figure out what to do there's that moment where you say oh what the hell let's try this because you know you've got to do something and you're at the point in time where nothing is not an option right you don't have enough information to make a perfect decision so you make an imperfect decision and you you accept that it's an imperfect |
| 40:06 | decision and then hopefully it's not a disastrously imperfect decision and you refine it exactly and along those lines we've been doing that experimentally in the tropical philippine sea and we've been having incredibly positive ecological results by restoring natural upwelling we've actually been able to restore primary production of macroalgae fish habitat for sardine fisheries and we've had literally nature voting with her fins with thousands of sardines hundreds of tuna dozens of dolphins and |
| 40:44 | even a whale shark spending days to months around the platforms and we're very encouraged and look forward to building up to hectare scale and encouraging a lot of marine ecological observation on the platforms yeah the only thing i would say is just that i accept that entirely but i think you do there are some people who want to leap straight into very large scale things without having properly looked at the detail and researcher and you should work through scaling up these things starting small small scale projects modeling and all |
| 41:18 | this stuff and you steadily increase the scale and so on so it should be done in a progressive way it might be done reasonably quickly but you still got to work through the process because otherwise you if you stay too many steps ahead you could find yourself falling off a cliff into a yes real agree every farmer is allowed to farm one hectare and our you know our canonical scale will be one hectare at a time and uh being able to invite ecological inspection at the hectare scale would enable small-scale um modeling if you |
| 41:50 | will and experimental evidence for the ecological uh ecosystem benefits but it's not always done that way i mean you look at if you look at the rise the rate at which the technology for instance with cell phones has kind of just it's just charged ahead with no no consideration at all as to the the uh the benefits you know all the things that the young people's addiction to um to to cell phones there hasn't been a proper study of all this in advance now if we're talking about the same kind of impact on society |
| 42:40 | then you know some things seem to be allowed to go ahead without without any without any constraints and other things like what we're talking about have to be you know held back but climate is a big problem it can't be held back yeah well there's scale and scale isn't a hectare is a ridiculously small area and a lot of these things are meaningless until you get to a large enough scale um you know you you want to be looking at a 100 square kilometers or so to make sense of of any of these big ocean experiments well yeah i got to |
| 43:21 | remember in the ocean the the so-called miser scale of mixing is probably nearer to 300 kilometers yeah so if you do things at a small scale you can be within a gyre or something but if you really want to see big effects you need quite a large scale which is why a lot of the ocean fertilization experiments were trying to build up to a much larger scale and i think the the last low effects one i think tried to fertilize an area of couple of hundred square kilometers i think something in that order so you need that's the sort |
| 43:49 | of scale you need to be able to see what would happen for a much larger scale you've got to get up to that sort of scale at least with that type of process you can't necessarily translate that into all the other possible techniques of course yeah the other problem with all of those chris is has been time one needs to things over a number of years to reassemble the longest observation was 40 days yeah ridiculously short term and i think what you're really doing is measuring the skill of knowing which bit of sea you treated |
| 44:20 | i would much rather have something which you you gave a lower dose over a much longer period and look looked at it for years um [Music] which brings us back to seven is boy and flake's idea nicely thanks bro no i i'm so the uh the gravity well reactor stuff have we have we more or less covered that now yeah the only thing i can add to that is i did have some discussions with marriott drilling who said it's perfectly possible to rent a well a deep well and if anybody wanted to do some experiments um you know |
| 45:00 | what one could actually do some of this online stuff um just making you aware if we can find the right people to to support it and under the the research yeah in fact you could also do it in a deep lakes because i know that the chinese for example have experimented with um an a sort of an upwelling fertilization type thing in a deep lake because um there are a few around not vast numbers perhaps but i mean the deepest in the world thousands of meters of course like lake bark isle or lake tanganyika but uh there are others that are not as deep as |
| 45:36 | that that could be usable as well but better is to do it in the ocean because uh there is surveyed and surface makes uh access an oxidant and then your your char becomes sufferized which would keep him much more resistant against oxidation yeah but one thing you can do in your deep lakes and so on is you can test your equipment in a much safer environment than you can in the ocean who are you saying you can rent a deep well from uh well marriott drilling who are you know experts in that field i had a very interesting conversation i forget the |
| 46:24 | name of the chap that runs it a little while back um and and talked about it and he said yeah they're not a problem i mean you you you can rent existing boreholes um you know they may be out of action may be used or they may have been all the oil the gas may have already been taken out but it's perfectly possible to do that so you've got contacts there yeah yeah um i'll have to dig out the chap's name but certainly you know if you if you know anybody i can certainly go back into my literally uh actually um uh pratik desai is doing |
| 47:04 | some work with them as well at the moment so a fresh connection we've been talking about um gravity well reactors sev anything more on that or do you want to go on to flakes um i think uh we've got done enough on the the char generation um okay well the the flakes are um they're it's basically using what most people regard as inert materials such as ferric oxide wastes natural materials such as lignin which is derived from from plants and phosphate wastes which are left over from phosphate refining and |
| 48:06 | you can put those together stick them onto rice husks which are buoyant and there's there's a lot of there's a 130 million tons of them a year basically going to waste they're not useful for much else and you should be able to glue the glued on onto the the rice husks using a hot melt lignin because lignin softens it under under heat and turn it into a semi permanent ultra slow release fertilizer in the ocean surface so you don't have to worry about ocean stratification or or the surface being too low in nutrients or the or the |
| 49:01 | soluble nutrients sinking too quickly to do much good and if you have these ultra slow release nutrients like iron oxide the ligands in phytoplankton actually can virtually suck out the iron from the iron oxide before it will it dissolves very very slowly rust doesn't easily dissolve in water but but the the phytoplankton can actually extract it and extract phosphate from phosphate rock and the the silica in the rice husks will the indian scientists have shown that it it does indeed slowly dissolve it's mainly because it's in uh |
| 50:01 | opaline form that's a sort of a hydrated form of silica which is much more solid soluble than sand and you're getting so just one question i mean a lot of these experiments which are proposed can only legally be done in big plastic bags i mean they can't be done in open sea you well you'd start in the lab you the indians have done some experiments in sea water in tanks on onboard ship yeah but and then but we're running out of time here seth yeah okay well you you you want to still want to you want to use mesa cosms those |
| 50:46 | plastic bags yes the indian scientists have used those uh in other other experiments and then you would if all goes well with those that graduated level of experiment you then start using a a small area in in some portion of the sea i've suggested off the west coast of india because that's got a nice reversing current so you can keep track of the uh where you've fertilized the ocean very easily and what's what is the risk now getting back to the um you know if if you're not quite sure then just go |
| 51:31 | ahead and do it what's the risk of going ahead and doing some of this stuff and i would say very little well uh you'd have to ask chris about that i mean it's frustrating because we are really running out of time and if if if certain experiments are not you know that they're low risk i mean it seems to me that the the thing that people worry about is this thing called the slippery slope oh look if you do this little experiment then the next thing you'll do is a big experiment and the next thing you'll do is to destroy |
| 52:13 | the planet i mean that's not what we're trying to do right i understand that any nation state could conduct small-scale experiments in jurisdictional waters now chris may may make you give us a better idea on that but i believe it can be done now and the indians well we know they've they've already done international groups already done 13 experiments with much more dangerous soluble fertilizers i believe it can be done right away by uk india small island state anyone to get approval to do it in international |
| 53:01 | waters would take a lot of diplomacy but there's an awful lot of jurisdictional waters you know micronesia has got um jurisdictional waters half the size of india the united states navy let off 40 000 pounds of tnt to test the hull of one of their aircraft carriers and then they did it a second time who gave them permission to do that would have killed every creature with for miles yeah well that falls after sovereign immunity i'm afraid which um states so it tends to exempt them from a lot of controls that might otherwise apply |
| 53:43 | [Music] the london protocol hasn't been ratified anyway so like any state that wished to proceed with this uh activity in national waters could do so well it's not quite not quite straightforward as that robert the protocol itself has been ratified and it is enforced from 53 countries what you're talking about is the amendment to the protocol which is a different thing and also the other thing is in international law it's an accepted practice that any countries who have ratified will abide by that uh to those |
| 54:20 | amendments irrespective of them being enforced or not and implicitly the same applies to any countries who voted for it in the meeting which is a further group of countries so it's not quite straightforward but in practice you're right that or sev was right that countries could decide uk for example could potentially decide they would wish to permit an experiment under their jurisdiction and that could be in international waters if it's from a uk flag vessel they would still have control whether that would raise all sorts of |
| 54:53 | concerns from other countries of course is a very different question and probably would but actually technically i suspect it could be done it would be a lot easier though in jurisdictional waters as sev said so chris this is shawn hello sorry i arrived late two questions first of all um if you could just clarify the amendment to which you're referring but then secondly also um i was under the impression and i could be wrong that the protocol is about dumping of waste at sea but actually it does not cover as i understand it actually the |
| 55:26 | undertaking of experiments we just had a discussion earlier on that chris do you point to recap on what we said about that before the london protocol as it stood prior to 2006 did what you described however in 2006 the first change happened when it was amended to permit the disposal of carbon dioxide in subsea geological formations that extended the rumor to the protocol the 2013 marine geo engineering amendments also changed the remit of the protocol to cover any marine geoengineering purposes i can direct you to the |
| 56:08 | detail of that if you wish so anything that's done for marine geo engineering but it's qualified by the fact it's got to have potentially deleterious effects and be potentially long-lasting uh can't what's the word long-lasting something and severe uses some language from a different uh treaty the end mod treaty uh for um military use of the uh in sort of environment um so those changes have extended the remit beyond dumping there's no question now the protocol does not just deal with dumping so chris |
| 56:46 | if this was framed as remedial work that was designed to restore nutrient cycles to enhance biomass in an area of ocean and we didn't mention geoengineering because we were focused on restoring fisheries sorry well the definition of marine engineering as described does not just limit it to climate-related activities it can cover any other activity that could be deemed to be deleterious provided it's of a scale that would raise concerns and at the moment it only covers ocean fertilization as you're aware |
| 57:43 | yeah experiments can normally smaller scale experiments are normally exempted i understand purposes there's no formal exemption per se at all um nationals yes there is chris it's small-scale coastal scientific experiments that is the cbd you're referring to not the london protocol i'm sorry okay um and the other i mean currently for any other purposes uh you can do experiments in the marine environment under your national legislation and the uk has permitted that ever since the dumping legislation |
| 58:19 | was in enforce so we've done experimental spills of things like oil to trial cleanups we've done experimental skills or spills of chemicals again to see what happens if you get those spills and how you can clean them up and we've used things like radioactive tracers and other types of traces for scientific purposes they all leave in a small scale and you put it into the sea for a purpose so all of those things can be permitted the difficulty comes when if it falls under the london protocol amendment and |
| 58:52 | particularly obviously when that's in force but at the moment it isn't when we for our spice project we wanted to put a bathtub of water a kilometer yeah and that was deemed completely unacceptable well by some people who are against your engineering it's all deemed unacceptable because of this thing called the slippery slope so why does the slippery slope not apply to ocean-based experiments um i wouldn't say it doesn't apply um they would say it did but but in fact the siblings hope arguments are normally |
| 59:34 | nonsensical when the danger of not doing it as chris says is far greater yeah of course certainly the australian greens have said that the marine cloud brightening experiments on uh to save the great barrier reef uh should be banned for slippery slope uh reasons who said that with the australian grains of the greens oh yeah sure i mean there are some people who are who are against um any type of geo engineering for purely what i would call political reasons nothing to do with the science or the technical or anything like that |
| 1:00:10 | it's a political philosophy um there are certain ngos who uh take that sort of line there are some in uh germany as and other parts of the world as well there are two ways of addressing separate questions in the ocean um the first is uh decarbonization and starting out the discussion with 80 decarbonization scenario and the second is discussing how to restore ecosystem services that have been lost in the ocean uh in industrial times and those are two effective strategies to address slippery slope concerns yeah in fact an argument has been made |
| 1:00:49 | in a paper that was published a few years ago by rob bellamy that we don't have a slippery slope with trying to deal with climate we have an uphill struggle which is probably much more opposite yeah that came out of we we worked that up we worked that up over a beer i remember i mean i was trying to liken it to um those those games where you you you get a big plastic sheet on a slope and you cover it with with water and you try and get your your kids from school to clamber up the slope and yeah going up a slippery slope is really |
| 1:01:30 | difficult but the idea that a slippery slope is a downward slippery slope is just completely failing to understand the complexities of what we're trying to do yeah i mean uh the the social scientists always point to i think um this guy called collingridge who developed wrote a book all about this uh quite some time ago but people have pointed out the slippery slope is nothing like universal it may be a slippery slope in some cases but if you look at technology generally the assumption that any and every technology is inevitable it's all going |
| 1:02:09 | to come to pass just doesn't uh resonate with reality a lot of technologies of course or potential technologies fail and never come to get into production because they they don't succeed which can be for a variety of reasons but so the slippery slope is not a universal something that happens to everything okay so we've talked about the barriers but actually we've identified that there aren't that many barriers if we find somewhere with national waters that it could be done in so is there anything |
| 1:02:39 | else in terms of understanding that the buoyant flakes that everybody should be aware of in terms of what they can do if they do manage to increase uh phytoplankton concentrations you're going to get ramifications uh up the food web but you'll also get more dimethyl sulfide being released uh into the atmosphere which will help create more cloud and and the actually the colour of the phytoplankton will also tend to reflect more sunlight so there will be a double cooling effect from issuing the buoyant flakes so if you were to say |
| 1:03:27 | introduce them into the uh southern atlantic ocean uh before the the gulf stream hits the caribbean and goes up the american east coast to the arctic you'd actually cool the water going to the arctic sea can the flakes be made more reflective uh you don't want to you you ought to let the the the life growing on those nutrients do do the reflection yes the flakes will become colonized with light green algae which will darken them from possibly the the the brown color of the of the lignin to a a light green color so that that |
| 1:04:19 | that'll help but but no you don't want to don't want to mess around with otherwise um does the dms that's released uh also i have a cooling action through marine cloud brightening yes is that through dimethyl sulfide how does the dimethyl sulfide get produced a dying phytoplankton release it and this is a sort of a gaian again thing and therefore they they can help mediate their own environment by by the dying cools the water down and therefore uh it benefits them in overheated waters there's a very good paper by charleston |
| 1:05:05 | and lovelock about this against a lot of detail about the dimethyl sulfide yeah it's not a simple straightforward just dimethyl sapphire there's several other compounds involved in the reaction but i should also point out that since the so-called claw hypothesis as it's called um came out quite a few years ago now there have been um some people who now dispute that in fact so it's not a generally accepted thing necessarily not saying it's wrong but it's not generally accepted thesis i think |
| 1:05:38 | so what are the uncertainties there because we certainly can document on dms dmso and dmsp what do you what would you say are the greatest scientific uncertainties about that natural chain oh yeah those are certainly produced but it's the overall detail of the hypothesis i don't know the detail because i haven't really looked into it myself i've just cut into a cena uh one or two papers that have disputed the basics of the original paper by lovelock and and co right now the empirical evidence is |
| 1:06:09 | fairly compelling if you look at the plume of nutrients on the equatorial pacific for example you can see the the chlorophyll tracks and the cloud cover tracks correlate beautifully and you can see globally by satellite the correlation of chlorophyll and cloud cover is rather rather beautifully correlated especially in the animations i'm just wondering you know there's been some nice satellite data since the original lovelock paper has that been brought to bear to put this question to rest i don't know |
| 1:06:42 | can we take a look at that with la palma at the moment with that volcano going off which must be seeding the ocean pretty significantly right now good question how long has it been erupting uh 10 days yeah it's about since last friday just was about four or five days now i think yeah but we should check whether the iron is tropospheric or stratospheric and the magnitude i know pinot tubo had a market dent on global co2 levels uh trackable from the early 1990s but uh we should see the magnitude of this one now the |
| 1:07:19 | magnitude of this one is definitely tropospheric not stratospheric it's not pushing clouds that high into the atmosphere it's definitely relatively local speaking is like what have i seen of it uh that might make it actually easier to do some spatial controls because if it is tropospheric we could measure upstream and downstream uh chlorophyll dms and cloud cover those will all be interesting yeah also and also volcanoes should uh decrease methane because it acts like uh iron iii chloride do volcanoes release methane or not |
| 1:08:00 | uh they will this s will act like uh iron three chloride in the air volcano volcanoes do release other sorts of gases as well not just so2 there's um other gases i'm not sure of the detail i can't remember now but there are certainly other gases released with volcanoes but just to remind me the contrast is a paper last week the fallout from the wildfires in australia how that caused phosphoplankton blooms in the pacific but they were relatively short-lived they didn't uh last that long and it's probable that most of that |
| 1:08:42 | was taken up in the surface mixed layers and didn't really make much difference to any sequestration rust george when he did his experiments uh which were reviled uh by you know a few um uh people with loud voices um he he based it on uh what happened with local volcanoes uh in the northwest pacific where he was doing the experiment yeah yeah that was the volcano in the aleutian islands that went off for some years earlier that affected that the gulf of alaska as there is another one going off right now in the illusion |
| 1:09:29 | is that all right yeah i mean it had a dramatic effect on on fish stocks the salmon stocks which which did the the the volcano that he was observing yeah and that that gave him the the um doing his experiment but his experiments have there's been some controversy and i don't think it's been resolved as to whether or not it actually caused the uh fish increases in subsequent years i think for one thing it happened the following year which is actually too early for the cycle of salmon for it to have been caused by the |
| 1:10:08 | experiment that he carried out so um there is actually dispute about that yeah the timing was relatively perfect you know maybe prescient but now if you look at the peak salmon in the pacific northwest it was one to two years after the fertilization experiment so that was an interesting confluence of nothing else there was also two year cyclings of it it they the numbers increased at two-year intervals which is linked apparently to the the the growth of juvenile salmon yeah yeah the other thing i i saw a video of the |
| 1:10:47 | experiment and i'm frankly very doubtful that he caused nearly as much blooms as he said because he he poured powdered ferrous ammonium sulfur into the sea um just down a chute over the edge of the ship so i suspect i would guess 50 to 80 percent of the stuff went straight through the surface layer of the ocean and did nothing frankly because um all the other fertilization experiments dissolve the material first so dispersed in surface waters if you pour a fairly coarse-ish powder into the ocean some of it will dissolve a lot of it's going to |
| 1:11:23 | sink the story was that it wasn't compared to past normal particles in the ocean certainly how deep was the water there because if it was on the seabed it might then come back up no they were they were like 200 plus miles offshore so um water would have been very deep thousands of meters anyway that's a relatively short duration experiment as well we want to get back to a situation where we've got some that runs over a couple of years where those nutrients are readily available if you wanted to repeat |
| 1:12:03 | if you wanted to repeat russ george's experiments uh robustly how would you do how would you do brew what do you reckon how would you do it um well i don't know i personally i'd rather i'd rather have a go with the boy in flakes because that makes a lot more sense to me um than just pouring stuff into the ocean having having little homes for for little ecosystems to develop around makes is far more logical yeah absolutely i mean they would take take an area as proposed and have a go at it um that's a good point um that |
| 1:12:54 | brew is that um you know iron the fate of iron if if it's not taken up biologically um whatever is not taken up biologically will sink in short order as it turns to ferric very quickly and i think a benefit of the buoyant flakes is that uh you do have uh buoyancy for an extended period of time and then there was work done by victor smedeck where by working in a properly turning mesoscale eddy you can actually have a bit of a containment bottle in other words the baroclinic lows that converge will hydrodynamically contain |
| 1:13:32 | the operation and so you'll be able to characterize it fairly well in a limited geography so that would be a particularly attractive location to utilize they will also keep other stuff out so maybe they're going to prevent the the the immigration of the the phytoplankton well actually no materials coming in spiraling in uh at the surface of a baroclinic low and as a result uh the the phytoplankton from the outside world is coming in but then uh the point is that any uh you know you're actually getting a uh a |
| 1:14:10 | deepening of a mixed layer a bit and um so uh it prevents what it does is it keeps the surface mixed layer hydrodynamically contained so that uh things come in but they don't go out it's closer to a black hole yeah but if things can't come in sorry if things can't get out other things different things can't come in i don't know and they keep so hard no no it's not a bottle it's more like a black hole where you can suck in anything and then it there's some uh flux that goes to the deeper layers |
| 1:14:47 | and so this the mix layer does converge in such a bare clinic low and um things can come in but not go out so easily i thought water had a high belt modulus uh it's in it's incompressible if that's what you're referring to about it's preservation this is all about mixed layer flow moving in towards the center of the mesoscale eddy and there being a net export vertically just as you see in a hurricane in different parts of the hurricane um so it is a uh you know bare clinic low as i recall from that perspective the problem with |
| 1:15:28 | the low that uh victor smith check chose though was that it was very low in silica which meant his diatoms didn't bloom nearly as much as they should have done and that's one of the potential problems again it was one of these containment things if you've already have plankton in there that have used up some of the nutrients um you may then find you're deficient in some of the nutrients and that's what happened in that experiment yeah hereby not just give them iron give them give them silicates |
| 1:15:52 | and give them what they need um this is much more logical to put the right sort of mix in if you gonna compare it to someone farming a field you know you analyze the soil what's missing and you put what you need in to to get the right results which is kind of related we know that the um the whale population on the planet has reduced has really reduced by maybe 100 times over the last century or so to what extent do we reckon that buoyant flakes or some kind of ocean iron fertilization will restore um whale populations |
| 1:16:36 | and what is the impact of whale populations on the carbon cycle i could i could represent a good reservoir of iron uh in that the whales poop the plankton absorbent and the krill uptake it and so there's a biological reservoir of iron in the southern ocean that has been significantly depleted with the loss of two orders of magnitude of whales and whales do bring um they eat the krill some of it depths and bring it up to further up to the surface as well what's behind the question is with the whale population fully restored |
| 1:17:21 | then and maybe more than fully restored as to what it was um the biogeochemical pump function of for example whales you know the idea about this ocean fertilization actually is it a multi-cable exercise to basically regenerate the oceans and then have the full we've if we've mulled the whale population starting 200 years ago have we knackered the ecosystems of you know in a profound way and if we can crack that actually do we then have a carbon flux uh going through the oceans which we should be observing but we're not |
| 1:17:56 | because of what we've done to this particular yes this is this is how biology works how all the nutrients work so you know exactly so and the key thing is have we has anyone done any estimates as to what this number might be in in other words a fully restored ocean well there's a there's some key numbers about the total amount of living biomass on the planet which is around 550 gigatons now but the people who produced that report said this is at least half what they would have been six to seven thousand years ago |
| 1:18:32 | and it's a very interesting figure because if you add 500 giga tons of living carbon to the planet bring it back to what it was it's almost the perfect number to maintain that carbon in circulation and pull us back down to 280 parts per million so there's a very simple sum there i mean restored biomass on land and in the oceans everywhere and and it'll start taking care of itself and what's more if you put the bone flakes into the um the the oceans which have always been surface deficient in nutrients you can actually |
| 1:19:10 | bring them into production so you should be able to get even more whale mass than what there was 500 years ago notionally the answer is we won't have to keep doing it once we've invested back into life the system will take care of itself okay oh where does that figure what did you say 550 gigatonnes of living carbon yeah where where does that figure come from i it's there's quite a good report that the came out about two three years ago which was an estimate of the total amount of living carbon on the planet |
| 1:19:49 | um it was um and it wrote the number down significantly because it reduced the amount that they thought was in the oceans although it still says it's a significant gap i can find you copy the report here if you like and send it to you i'd be interested in that because because it's it's really interesting the fact that it's it's you know half what it should be and if you look at this the size of that figure if you put it back and you yeah well this is on land of course but um you know if the whole of north africa |
| 1:20:19 | was forested again and i'm we're doing some work with the weather makers the guys who are looking at this plan to re-green the sinai and john lew's work it's there's an interesting narrative there i've heard the figure of 40 percent decline in phytoplankton over the past 50 years that's that's actually quite a small figure in terms of the overall biomass um although there's this huge space in the oceans to put a lot more biomass in and to clarify the flux of carbon through phytoplankton is on the order of a |
| 1:21:00 | hundred gigatons per year but of course a lot of it is rapidly cycling so that export is small figures i've seen about half that brian well the key figure is that there's a carbon store which is the living carbon cycle it's the working carbon that is we've reduced it by half and if you can bring that back that's a huge cupboard to fill with carbon um that is not generally spoken about i think that's a good point um that case has been made for kelp forest where we've seen uh industrial decimations of kelp |
| 1:21:41 | starting in the 1930s with a lot of industrial farming and we pre in the 1800s we have documentary evidence from the u.s geodetic survey of kilometer wide rivers of kelp down the coast of california all the way into mexico well that's that's the fur trade from the 1700s isn't it taking out all the sea otters and other creatures it's part of it but i think actually um the time at which the kelp became discontinuous corresponded to broad acre tillage and runoff insultation and eutrophication of the |
| 1:22:17 | coastal waterways which lowered visibility to the point where juvenile kelps couldn't grow from their 25 meter depths up to the surface that was approximately in the 1930s for southern california and perhaps earlier from other locations yeah well there's so many things that link to that isn't it's it's various mollusks by valves that are cleaning the water that have gone as a result yeah we've seen a number of collapses the second collapse occurred in the last 20 years when we had a big warm blob from alaska and a strong |
| 1:22:52 | el nino in the 2014 and 2016 time frame resulting in a decimation in the near assistance kelp forest north of san francisco i'm just i'm just pondering that number 550 gigaton tons of carbon yeah divided by seven giga people seven billion people then that gives a figure of about 80 tons per person yeah and i mean that's not a it just shows the impact of human beings because that's like that's a we we generate each individual on the planet has a carbon footprint of of of 10 tons per year so like we the those figures are so |
| 1:23:54 | [Music] comparable with human impact that's what i'm trying to say yeah yeah so tom chi has an excellent line of reasoning on this the biomass of humans equals the biomass of ants and humans eat approximately three percent of their biomass per day and ants eat approximately 30 of their biomass per day what's the interesting distinction is that ants manage to provide ecosystem services while they are uh doing their eating so they actually aerate the soil you know recycle a lot of materials and uh regenerate a lot of |
| 1:24:29 | ecosystem services and if humans came even close to what ants do in terms of regenerative agriculture regenerative mariculture and actually just changing the way we eat rather than anything else we could go from extraction to regeneration and that's the uh actually the subject of a a seminar just starting um this week uh at the buck mr fuller institute on regenerative agriculture oh interesting yeah well look i mean humans have invented the internet but ants haven't yeah we could do that i'm waiting for |
| 1:25:03 | the analogy here the thing is we have we have such a narrow we have such a narrow view of what we perceive as being uh good and successful and you know it's it's it's distressing the things that we we rejoice in uh um not exactly i mean the ants do have an equivalent of the internet it's called pheromone release by the queen that's true very nice yeah if all our buildings were like termite mounds we'd be better off too yeah look i'm just gonna i'm i'm conscious of the fact that we've only got another |
| 1:25:46 | sort of five or so minutes to go um we've we've talked about buoyant flakes we've talked about um gravity wells we've talked a little bit about whales not new south wales and not even whales in the uh west of the united kingdom um uh we haven't talked about the demons victory on the yes we're still on cloud nine here go deez anyway so what what more do we what do we need to add on to our discussion i just i just like the rest one more thing okay so sorry hugh that just uh chris mentioned the bushfire uh iron |
| 1:26:31 | fertilization phytoplankton bloom wondering whether it should be a follow-up experiment looking at our red-eyed dust storms we have here regularly in australia which must must fertilize the ocean as well there's a whole team that could be rolled out to carry out a similar experiment on that um it's just to be an interesting one to follow up to to prove the natural process of iron from red dust storms there are the problem with dust is that it sinks too quickly it sinks in just several days but also some dust is not |
| 1:27:06 | very available forms of iron as well it depends on what form it is yes yes so just go through again what do you what are you what are you thinking about sorry it's johnny i've got my i'm on clive's uh yeah count sorry sorry you yeah yeah i'm thinking i'm thinking we should we should uh roll out the same team that they've already got drones and satellites and everything set up to do the bushfire uh phytoplankton experiment they could do a similar one for red dust i mean it could be done off the sahara |
| 1:27:42 | to prove the effect there as well uh whether whether that's something we should we should promote well can i raise one final issue which is that uh there's a desperate need to cool the arctic could we put the floating flakes in eddies of the the gulfstream water as it crosses the north atlantic could we cool the north atlantic water that way that's what i said earlier yes we could yep i think that would be the most most important application yeah imaginable and you can add you can add to that the setomizer effect which we're using |
| 1:28:26 | for the sinai desert that would also maximally cool the water and even the little fizz stop idea of injecting nano bubbles into the surface but also cool it more so you've got four ways of cooling water going into the arctic and that's without doing anything about eye thickening and also reduce hurricanes yes so if you want to just describe your fizz tops to people um they're table sized lightweight units using solar energy and fluidic oscillators to pump nano bubbles into the the micro layer on the sea surface |
| 1:29:14 | which has the effect of um reflecting some of the sunlight which cools the water and of because the the micro bubbles uh refract some of the sunlight um horizontally you would tend to heat up the micro layer and therefore increase ocean evaporation and decrease heat going into the deeper ocean and that could be done all with just these little little cheap units you'd probably use them first to uh more them off the water coming into the great bay reef and other reefs so that you would uh cool the waters there and stop coral bleaching |
| 1:30:08 | how do you make these nano bubbles um the the fluidic oscillators pulse um air at nanometers size or micrometer size into the ocean surface and how do you power the fluidic oscillators solar solar power so and said with this then as a result of the evaporation they lead to more cloud formation which would then actually have a further effect in terms of just the shield exactly yeah so i think i've sent katie's got the the the the paper on the on the fifth stops the reflection of the bubbles caused primarily a cooling effect since it |
| 1:30:59 | would reflect a lot of visible light back into the atmosphere yes is that kind of like what used to be called ocean foaming yes only ocean foaming only lasts for hours nano bubbles can last for months and they're not they're not buoyed they stay in that micro layer they don't float on top of the water and they're stabilized by by the ocean the the organics in the ocean but is it to do with the length scale of the bubbles that you're forming and therefore the stability of those and the surface tension effects as well brian |
| 1:31:40 | will probably know more about this than me well it's interesting you know the pressure of these small bubbles is significantly above atmospheric so i think a lot of it depends on nitrogen saturation in the water itself that determines the lifetime of the bubbles that said there is a case for biologic and other films and you know the the surfactants that are present in the sea water have a very significant effect on the lifetime of small bubbles and it's not something you can easily identify in the laboratory we |
| 1:32:08 | need to do some experiments in the ocean so what stabilizes the bubbles that makes them such a long lifetime the change in surface tension associated with the uh the anions and cations available and also the biofilms themselves have a significant effect on the lifetime based on the surface coatings that occur from these biofilms but the headline brian is is that the smaller the bubbles the more stable they are is that all right uh i'll say no and yes if in a pure water environment the um the pressure inside the bubble is |
| 1:32:41 | significantly above ambient and that increases the tendency for the bubble to dissolve right if it were not for the chemical and biological effects of the films and the cation and anions yeah okay so not not to be done at home don't do this at home do this in the ocean if you're going to do the experiment because you'll get markedly different results i've sent you a link to bulmax's uh website um these are the guys behind the fluid oscillator which is a no moving parts way of making fluids react to produce |
| 1:33:16 | micro bubbles of all you've just described brian it sounds to me that there may well be an optimum size then there likely is i think there's a key piece of uncertainty and i have not seen anything published well on this that really characterizes the lifetime of bubbles versus diameter in real marine environments with real sea water yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and biologics and chemistry that's that's very uncertain that's something we need to quantify sooner rather than later but do they take the lights off |
| 1:33:51 | the deeper layers 10 meters 20 meters steam it's probably not much of an issue i mean by far the greatest thing is um the the greenhouse warming effects and you know the stratification of the ocean i think is probably our deepest concern to kind of phrase but um you know this would reduce stratification of the ocean if it proves effective and the key uncertainty for us to resolve is the lifetime of these bubbles in a biochemical environment of the scene and they have they found some of them last as long as six months typically probably two or |
| 1:34:31 | three months but but that's a long long time yeah do you have field experiments results has anyone reported on field experiments of small bubbles uh lifetimes i don't know how much field experiments they've certainly tried them in the lab using surfactants and that and yes they have found that they last long okay yeah how close to the biochemistry of seawater were they using i think some of them have used actual sea water others have made simulated seawater very good yeah i think you know we need to develop the bibliography in |
| 1:35:13 | preparation for an experiment and that is really understanding for seawater biochemistry uh lifetime bubble lifetimes and uh you know let's certainly review the literature and then identify the gaps that need to be covered and of course the surfactants are continually replenished as phytoplankton die they're the main causes of the of the surfactants in the surface just one slight caution bear in mind that the surface micro layer is a very important layer for some life in the ocean um things like fish eggs and other things tend to can occur |
| 1:35:50 | in that layer i'm not saying this is an impossibility to get around it but bear in mind the surface mic layer is not just a top bit of the ocean it has a very particular characteristics and life forms in it yes the koreans and the japanese have done quite a lot of experiments with with nano bubbles and they've shown they have strong beneficial effects on marine life they're good at reducing pathogenicity and they're good at keeping viruses under control okay and likely improve oxygenation i imagine |
| 1:36:28 | yes probably said could your fish stops be used on reservoirs to reduce evaporation or not enough surfactants uh probably not enough surfactants but i i don't know for sure and and the the the iron content wouldn't be very high in fresh water it's much better in salt water people do other things for reservoirs anyway they can spread uh thin layers of vegetable oils and things i'm conscious we ought to be winding up i think now yeah um i've been making some notes um and i'll i'm happy to um |
| 1:37:14 | i'll circulate these and anybody wants to um to to to make comments on it i mean thank you that's great yes just a a random selection of comments who knows whether i've left stuff out but how about i circulate these amongst the group and if anybody wants to add to it they can't awesome great that's great but i've been recording this for clive too hugh so uh you know clive will circulate this afterwards fantastic well look i mean we've we're coming up to cop26 and it looks like nothing's going to happen |
| 1:37:56 | um it's well you know stuff will happen but it's pretty um we've got we've got to keep our energy up that's all i'm going to say we've got to keep we've got to keep our um discussions going good thank you well thanks sev much appreciated very good good okay ready guys very interesting good evening we're still celebrating here here good morning cheers bye bro bye excellent |