“The business is getting forward of the science,” says Isabella Arzeno-Soltero, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford College, who labored on the mission. “Our fast purpose was to see if, given optimum situations, we will truly obtain the scales of carbon harvests that persons are speaking about. And the reply is not any, probably not.”

Seaweed pulls carbon dioxide from the environment by way of photosynthesis, after which a big quantity is sequestered—probably for millennia—when the plant matter ultimately sinks down into the ocean depths. The thought is that it might be grown after which deliberately sunk to lock away that carbon lengthy sufficient to ease the stress on the local weather.

Arzeno-Soltero and her colleagues on the College of California, Irvine, used a software program mannequin to estimate how a lot seaweed, of 4 differing types, might be grown in oceans around the globe.

The mannequin thought-about issues just like the seaweed’s nitrate uptake (which is important for development), the water temperature, the solar’s depth, and peak of the ocean’s waves, utilizing world ocean knowledge gathered from previous years, whereas accounting for present farming practices. The researchers carried out greater than 1,000 seaweed development and harvest simulations for every of the seaweed varieties, which they mentioned represented the “optimistic higher bounds” for seaweed manufacturing. 

For instance, the brand new estimates assumed that farming area might be discovered inside the most efficient waters for seaweed within the equatorial Pacific, round 200 nautical miles off the coast. In much less productive areas, rising sufficient seaweed to achieve local weather targets could be much more difficult: 3 times as a lot area must be dedicated to seaweed farming to sequester the identical quantity of carbon.