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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Fish and phytoplankton grow near the nutrient rich water that comes out the top of the tube.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.