What’s interesting here is that the benefit isn’t just the biomass itself, but the way large scale seaweed farming nudges ocean chemistry in a direction that makes carbon stick around longer 😉
sundler on
>Seaweeds are versatile algae. They are sources of food, medicine, and many other products, and they have the added benefit of being extremely efficient at removing CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow.
>Fakhraee explains that coastal seaweed farms are an extremely effective way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere because these algae sequester carbon at high rates.
>seaweed farms speed up the process of building a layer of sediment as organic matter sinks to the seabed. These sediments create low or no-oxygen (anaerobic) environments where microbes take the carbon-rich biomass and produce bicarbonate. The bicarbonate then acts as a buffer to produce more alkaline, or less acidic, conditions.
>This would eventually result in a sequence train that removes CO2 from the atmosphere. That chemical process was not considered or was largely overlooked by previous studies.
>[Seaweed farming is] very sustainable, it doesn’t require too much technology, and there is not much controversy around using seaweed as a source of food as opposed to the other sources of protein concerning the production of greenhouse gases and other things
>Seaweed farms sequester a bit more than sea grasses, and they are on par with mangroves and some other basic types of blue carbon ecosystems.
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What’s interesting here is that the benefit isn’t just the biomass itself, but the way large scale seaweed farming nudges ocean chemistry in a direction that makes carbon stick around longer 😉
>Seaweeds are versatile algae. They are sources of food, medicine, and many other products, and they have the added benefit of being extremely efficient at removing CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow.
>Fakhraee explains that coastal seaweed farms are an extremely effective way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere because these algae sequester carbon at high rates.
>seaweed farms speed up the process of building a layer of sediment as organic matter sinks to the seabed. These sediments create low or no-oxygen (anaerobic) environments where microbes take the carbon-rich biomass and produce bicarbonate. The bicarbonate then acts as a buffer to produce more alkaline, or less acidic, conditions.
>This would eventually result in a sequence train that removes CO2 from the atmosphere. That chemical process was not considered or was largely overlooked by previous studies.
>[Seaweed farming is] very sustainable, it doesn’t require too much technology, and there is not much controversy around using seaweed as a source of food as opposed to the other sources of protein concerning the production of greenhouse gases and other things
>Seaweed farms sequester a bit more than sea grasses, and they are on par with mangroves and some other basic types of blue carbon ecosystems.