Brainstorming ways to Improve Ocean Health
As you all probably know by now we have passed 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere as measured through satellite data and measurement stations. I know it remains controversial if this fact is of great importance to life on the planet or not, I personally think it is very important for many different reasons.
I was watching another video by Paul Beckwith about, “Filling our Oceans with Fish to Calm Climate” and it seemed like a really good idea to me. Doing something that fills the ocean with fish would be wonderful in so many ways.
One of the websites Paul Beckwith references in his video has some detailed information on Artificial Upwelling near the bottom of the page. There is a link on this page to an interesting video on experiments using a tube to bring up nutrient rich ocean water to increase phytoplankton blooms. This could result in improving the ocean health and remove the excess CO2 from the air while improving the fishing.
This information got me thinking about how to design an artificial upwelling tube cheaply and how we might possibly fund such a tube. This is just some amusing ideas I brainstormed, my background is mostly in computer science and I’m not sure how practical this design is. The rough drawing is not to scale at all, and to give some ideas of the size, people have suggested that they be around 30 feet in diameter and 300 to 600 feet long.
Hand drawn diagram of upwelling tube ideas. – click for viewing full screen
This would be a floating island made up of recycled plastic bottles, Styrofoam, or other buoyant discarded items. Some type of durable bag or rope would hold it together. It would float high enough on the water so that boats could see it. A windmill or solar panels could generate power. For some tubes the island would have Internet linked cameras both above and below the water line and a GPS location. By showing this information to the public, people could be enticed to send funding for the project or use the location information as possible places where the fishing could be good. The cameras would be great to see how well things worked and what things cause the tube to fail. Birds could use the island as a nesting location if it was large enough and materials could encourage the limited growth of plants and rainwater collection.
The top of the tube could have additional objects for flotation and encouraging barnacle growth. It is attached to the floating island by a chain and the wave action moves the tube up and down. The tube would be made from flexible plastic sheeting so it would be easy to deploy.
Fish and phytoplankton grow near the nutrient rich water that comes out the top of the tube.
Some type of weight is on the bottom of the tube to keep it loaded down in the water and hold the end open. Maybe bags of iron fillings could be put here. Iron fillings can be easily obtained by moving a magnet in iron rich soil. The iron can help fertilize the water for the plankton. Other types of rocks that weather nicely could be used too.
End of life for the tube would happen if it gets damaged badly so the floating island breaks apart or too much marine growth happens on the tube and island so it sinks down to the bottom of the sea.
This is a chain attached to the bottom of the tube with an additional weight on the end. My thoughts are that if the tube drifts to close to a shallow area the weight here will help prevent it from getting to close to the shore and beached. Having a chain on the bottom end should let it continue to function in this case.
This is showing the inside of the tube. It is lined with small hair like fibers at various points. The fibers like to move one direction better than the other. This way the wave action on the floating island will pull the water up the tube in the same way that the little hairs in your lungs like to pull particles up and out of your lungs when you breathe. A simple valve on the end of the tube like in the video would be another option but might be more likely to crush or trap fish during its operation and perhaps be more expensive to produce.
Just some ideas that I had fun thinking about. It would be really wonderful to see the ocean really healthy with plenty of fish and life. I’m encouraged by the possibilities we have of bringing new abundance to all forms of life, I hope your are too.
Thanks for reading! Videos linked to on Youtube are not my work.
It is a good concept but I am skeptical about creating "islands" of life. It will only serve as a way of aggregating fish in a local area, where commercial fishermen will then exploit. Good for their livelihood, but I doubt the long term result would help CO2 levels. Awesome post though... we need to keep pumping out the ideas, pun intended of course :)
Actually, I kind of didn't state the main point of the tubes is to create more phytoplankton in the ocean. The phytoplankton produce oxygen and remove CO2 from the ocean water helping adjust the CO2 levels. The second video gives more information on how this works.
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I know we can use the ocean to help us not put excessively more CO2 into the atmosphere. I have seen several types of wave power- generations that look promising
It is very exciting to see all the new ideas and technologies. I read an article on a startup in Seattle today that has solved a lot of issues with hydrogen use too. We may all be converting our cars soon to run on low polluting renewable energy.
First off sorry, when I made that comment, I had nodded off several times. I was trying to say about using waves to generate electricity. I always am interested in green energy like wind, solar and waves! Good stuff and makes so much sense to me!
I like the project creating these artificial reef balls. Check it out @ http://www.reefball.org/
That is really neat! It is wonderful to see these types of ideas being done to support the ocean health. Thanks for sharing.
It's amazing how simple some of them are. I wish the news reported more on things like this than just so much focus on shootings and politics...
It is so good to see you commenting. I don't know where you had disappeared a few days back. I have yet to read the post thoroughly and watch the videos so I'll leave a proper post related comment on it later. Right now, just happy :)
Nice to hear from you too! I'm always busy doing this or that, it is hard to find the time to comment or post much. I've been very happy lately too, things are looking very good in many ways.
It's really impressive to me when your photo of the ocean is really healthy with lots of fish and life. Sometimes I take recreation with my family to the sea and even underwater to see the fish, I like the sea world. you @lightsplasher is a senior friend in my life in steemit, i hope you always support me in this steemit, i want to pay my debt
I thought it was really neat when near the end of the second video the young whale came by to eat the phytoplankton that the tube had created. It is very inspiring to see the life in the ocean - I enjoyed snorkeling once and got to see the underwater fish when we went on vacation. The ocean near me is too cold to swim and see the fish in, but I like to go see the whales and go boating.
Industrialization has its own downside for our environment and I think we just need to use more greener energy instead of fossil fuels. Marine plants does filter wastes from the oceans and they also produce oxygen so it will be also better to cultivate them into our oceans but that takes resources again which boils down to using greener energy.
Switching to greener energy would be my first choice too, and it looks very hopeful that we will be doing so soon. However, we are also depleting the ocean fish by overfishing and pollution. Spending some resources in producing a better environment for supporting the larger ocean fish seems good. Granted there are always secondary unplanned effects of any action we may take but artificial upwelling to produce increased phytoplankton seems initially to be a good idea as far as I can see but I'm no expert in this.
Woooww...
Very good idea and very brilliant.
That way CO2 in the air can be reduced and hopefully can be resolved.
Good job my dear @lightsplasher 🖒🖒
Thank you! I was really excited to hear about these things. It seems like something that could be easily constructed to improve fishing and reduce CO2. The basic idea was researched and tested several years ago. I think it is time that people start deploying tubes like this all over the ocean.
This is very useful, hopefully what we aspire to this can be realized ☺
Thanks for informations
Good post friend @lightsplasher
I upvote and resteem
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