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Oceans swallow huge amounts of carbon dioxide pollution each year, helping to mitigate climate change, but at the cost of the seas becoming more and more acidic. But what if we could increase the Atlantic’s appetite for the greenhouse gas by giving it the equivalent of a giant antacid tablet?
That is the basic hypothesis behind a controversial geoengineering experiment planned by scientists at the highly respected Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a private marine research non-profit organization.
“We don’t want there to be a prospect of a whale or something coming into contact with that,” said Daniel McCorkle, a co-principal investigator for the sodium hydroxide experiment and emeritus scientist in WHOI’s department of geology and geophysics.
“We don’t know exactly what the risks are, because no one has been crazy enough to do this before,” said Ben Day, a Massachusetts-based senior campaign manager for Friends of the Earth. “It’s kind of like the thinking that got us here in the first place: Thinking that we can control Earth’s systems without unintended consequences.”
Even a relatively small amount of sodium hydroxide solution released in the ocean will kill “foundational” marine life, including phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish larvae, and displace or injure other creatures due to the huge spikes in alkalinity, said James Kerry, an adjunct marine scientist at the James Cook University in Australia.
“I see it, essentially, as trying to address one form of marine pollution — carbon dioxide — with another” pollutant, said Kerry, who is also a senior marine and climate scientist for OceanCare, a marine conservation nonprofit organization based in Switzerland.