Smetacek et al. (2024): Rectifying misinformation on the climate intervention potential of ocean afforestation
Victor Smetacek, Mar Fernández-Méndez, Franziska Pausch, Jiajun Wu IN: Nature Communications, 15, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47134-6
The authors show that the green and golden tides of Ulva prolifera and Sargassum horneri, respectively, that build up dense mats of free-floating biomass in the millions-of-tonnes range in the eutrophic, central Yellow Sea are more appropriate “natural analogues” for future OAFF than the diffuse Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB). The dense Yellow Sea algal rafts demonstrate that disparate macroalgal species are capable of building up prodigious, free-floating, harvestable biomass at rates depending on the supplies of seeding stocks (from macroalgal thalli fragments) and nutrients (by eutrophication) that can serve as potential crops for seaweed farms based on artificial upwelling of nutrient-rich water in the vast spaces of the open ocean.