Little Fluffy Clouds May Help Save Australia's Great Barrier Reef (reuters.com) 20
To slow the speed at which high temperatures and warm waters bleach the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, Australian scientists are spraying droplets of ocean water into the sky to form clouds to protect the environmental treasure. From a report: Researchers working on the so-called Cloud Brightening project said they use a turbine to spray microscopic sea particles to thicken existing clouds and reduce sunlight on the world's largest coral reef ecosystem located off Australia's northeast coast. The water droplets evaporate leaving only tiny salt crystals which float up into the atmosphere allowing water vapour to condense around them, forming clouds, said Daniel Harrison, a senior lecturer at Southern Cross University, who runs the project.
"If we do it over an extended period of time for a few weeks to a couple of months when the corals are experiencing a marine heatwave we can actually start to lower the water temperature over the Reef," said Harrison. The project had its second trial in March, the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer when the Reef off Australia's northeast is at its hottest, gathering valuable data on the atmosphere when corals are at most risk of bleaching. A combination of light and warm water causes coral bleaching. By cutting light over the reef by 6% in summer, "bleaching stress" would be cut by 50% to 60% on the undersea ecosystem, Harrison said.
"If we do it over an extended period of time for a few weeks to a couple of months when the corals are experiencing a marine heatwave we can actually start to lower the water temperature over the Reef," said Harrison. The project had its second trial in March, the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer when the Reef off Australia's northeast is at its hottest, gathering valuable data on the atmosphere when corals are at most risk of bleaching. A combination of light and warm water causes coral bleaching. By cutting light over the reef by 6% in summer, "bleaching stress" would be cut by 50% to 60% on the undersea ecosystem, Harrison said.
Bob Ross science (Score:1)
saved by the red afro
Reuse plastic ocean junk? (Score:4, Insightful)
How about somehow recycle the used plastic bottles that are already floating around the ocean to sort of float them or drag them over the coral areas to reduce sunlight? Probably a terrible idea for many reasons, but if the main goal is to cut sunlight... seems like there'd be some other way to supplement the option of creating clouds.
What sort of seaweed grows over there? No natural plant matter for sunblock?
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All that stuff gets caught on the reef, and kills the reef and reef wildlife.
Sea weed (sargassum) blooms in the Caribbean get caught on the reef and just block out all life killing the coral, entangling sea life and killing it - it's fine in it's natural state, but the blooms caused by excess fertiliser run off into the Gulf of Mexico just choke the reefs. The same would be true in the Great Barrier Reef where many reefs are incredibly shallow, where seaweed would snag on those shallow reefs and do just as
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How about somehow recycle the used plastic bottles that are already floating around the ocean to sort of float them or drag them over the coral areas to reduce sunlight? Probably a terrible idea for many reasons, but if the main goal is to cut sunlight...
The article said the goal was to reduce water temperature. I can see that clouds would do that (by reflecting heat) but I can't imagine how plastics would do it?
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How about somehow recycle the used plastic bottles that are already floating around the ocean ...
So collect the 100,000 tons of plastic from The Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
If you could somehow manage that, and make it into floating white pellets, you still only have around 0.2g/sq.m. over the GBR. And then it just floats off.
Trying to cool the earth with a surface reflective layer uses an impossibly large amount of material, but a fine spray in the upper atmosphere is doable.
This salt-spray approach produces a local short-term result, but other methods can cool the whole globe. With downsides, of c
90's ambient house music (Score:4)
Is here to safe the reefs
The Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds [youtube.com]
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Classic Techno - Oh the ounces of herb I smoked to this album...
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Came for this exact post. Was not disappoined.
But... (Score:3)
Salt issue? (Score:2)
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It's salt water sprayed up from the ocean surface, raining back into the ocean downrange. I doubt that the effect on local salinity is even measurable, and this isn't close enough to the coast that the mist plume could reach land.
Looking at the footage, it seems... rather underwhelming when you consider the scale of the ocean. They'd need thousands upon thousands of these things to make a difference across the entire length of the reef complex.
Here's a Band-aid (Score:4, Interesting)
Just One Question (Score:2)
What is a microscopic sea particle?
Climate panic, news at 11:00 (Score:2)
Natural variations, folks. Predation and bleaching are nothing new. The barrier reef is recovering nicely from the last round thereof, but you'll never hear climate alarmists talk about it, because it would undermine their agenda. See, for example, this official report from the Australian government. [aims.gov.au] Some excerpts:
- On the Northern GBR, region-wide hard coral cover was moderate and had continued to increase to 27% from the most recent low point in 2017.
- On the Central GBR region-wide hard coral cover w
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That's right. And the reef is the size of the state of Victoria (aka bloody huge), so any talk of intervention with "spraying clouds" or other pie in the sky ideas, is fantasy land.
Not Natural Variation. (Score:4, Informative)
The barrier reef is recovering nicely from the last round thereof, you'll never hear climate alarmists talk about it, because it would undermine their agenda.
I'm curious about climate change denial in the modern age. Where do you get your counterscientific views?
How do you feel about the flat earth, yowies, and vaccinations? Or is climate change denial your one thing?
"Natural variations, folks" is wrong an unsupported. Your own link [aims.gov.au] attributes bleaching to "the Great Barrier Reef is already experiencing the consequences of climate change.":
In the austral summer of 2020, the Great Barrier Reef was subjected to accumulated heat stress to the level at which mass coral bleaching occurred across much of the GBR. This included the Southern GBR which had escaped bleaching in the 2016 and 2017 events. The third such event in five years is a sign that the Great Barrier Reef is already experiencing the consequences of climate change.
And it ties the future of the reef to ameliorating climate change:
The prognosis for the future disturbance regime under climate change is one of increasingly frequent and longer lasting marine heatwaves and a greater proportion of severe tropical cyclones. Mitigation of these climatic threats requires immediate global action on climate change.
And it explains the the current as well as the future problems are exacerbated by climate change:
The predicted consequences of climate change, which include more frequent and intense mass coral bleaching events, are now a contemporary reality. Simultaneously, chronic stressors such as high turbidity, increasing ocean temperatures and changing ocean chemistry can all negatively affect recovery rates, while more frequent acute disturbances mean that the intervals for recovery are becoming shorter.