"Is there potential for seaweeds to help solve the climate crisis?"
"Cornelia Rindt steadies herself on a rocking boat while she and colleagues lean over the side to secure a meter-long tube of mud. It is her team’s first sample taken from the seafloor on British Columbia’s coastline. It will take more than a week to get just six more.
“It’s as much of an art as it is a science,” says Rindt, a project developer for BC-based consultancy Ostrom Climate Solutions (formerly NatureBank). The coring device has to be lowered blindly through 100 meters of water—too deep for divers to navigate—and land vertically at the right speed, rather than bouncing off a rock or tipping over in the currents, in order to capture a good slice of the soft sediment below. That will then go to the lab to determine how much carbon is locked inside. It takes maybe five tries to get a good sample, she says; some days they get nothing at all. Once, she remembers, the loose mud they pulled up flooded out of the tube before they could capture it: “That was 30 centimeters of sample that just went whoosh. It was deep green and I could smell the carbon.”
The sampling is part of Ostrom Climate Solutions’s effort to help fill in the giant scientific blanks about kelp, the group of large brown algae that make up the oceanic “forests” of Canada’s west coast. The company is making the effort at the behest of Coastal First Nations (CFN), an alliance of nine First Nations in British Columbia, and the Nanwakolas Council, representing five First Nations with traditional lands on northern Vancouver Island and part of the BC mainland coast. The big question they seek to answer is just how much kelp sloughs off, like dead skin, and falls to the ocean floor for permanent storage in the sediment. In other words: just how good is kelp at locking up carbon and helping to fight climate change?"
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