Cultivating seaweed could restore oceanic dead zones, scientists conclude naturalnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from naturalnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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“Cultivating seaweed in less than 1% of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico could potentially reach the country’s pollution reduction goals that, for decades, have been difficult to achieve,” said lead author Phoebe Racine, a Ph.D. candidate at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.
“Dealing with nutrient pollution is difficult and expensive,” Bradley added. The U.S. alone spends more than $27 billion every year on wastewater treatment.
Many regions employ water quality trading programs to manage this issue. In these cap-and-trade systems regulators set a limit on the amount of a pollutant that can be released, and then entities trade credits in a market.
Farming algae could surprisingly help stave off deadly algae blooms
If you can t beat them. sow them? In water? Could work. A A
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One possible solution to nutrient pollution and dangerous algal blooms could be seaweed farms, a new paper reports.
Image credits NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory / Flickr.
We don’t tend to think of “too much food” as a real problem, but for ecosystems around the world, it very much can be. Marine ecosystems especially suffer from nutrient pollution, as most of our waste tends to get dumped in the sea. This kind of pollution can become very deadly, as high levels of nutrients foster algal blooms which destroy water quality and deplete its oxygen in short, they kill everything else around them.
Seaweed solutions eurekalert.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eurekalert.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Harrison Tasoff
Santa Barbara, CA
It’s easy to think that more nutrients – the stuff life needs to grow and thrive – would foster more vibrant ecosystems. Yet nutrient pollution has in fact wrought havoc on marine systems, contributing to harmful algae blooms, worse water quality and oxygen-poor dead zones.
A team of researchers from UC Santa Barbara has proposed a novel strategy for reducing large amounts of nutrients – specifically nitrogen and phosphorous – after they have already been released into the environment. In a study appearing in the journal Marine Policy, the authors contend that seaweed’s incredible ability to draw nutrients from the water could provide an efficient and cost-effective solution. Looking at the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, the team identified over 63,000 square kilometers suitable for seaweed aquaculture.