Lost to the sea

Biorock methods speed up coral growth in damaged areas and restore authentic coral reef habitat and species. Biorock structures become rapidly colonized by a full range of coral reef organisms, including fish, crabs, clams, octopus, lobster, sea urchins. Species typically found in healthy reef environments are given an electrical advantage over the weedy organisms which often overgrow them in reefs stressed by humans. The advantages corals gain from mineral accretion are cancelled if they no longer receive current, at which point weeds will overgrow the corals. If the current is maintained, coral reefs can often be restored even in areas where water quality would prevent their recovery by any other method.

Biorock structures cement themselves to the hard bottom providing a physical wave barrier which over time, grows larger and stronger.  Biorock materials are to an extent, structurally self healing. If a section is damaged, the cracks will fill making them ideal for breakwater shore protection.

Biorock projects can be powered by a wide range of electrical sources including renewable energy like windmills, photovoltaic solar panels and tidal current generators. This enables their construction in areas where conventional electric power is unavailable.

The mineral accretion process was first developed by architect Wolf Hilbertz in order to provide alternative construction materials. He and Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance later developed its use for reef restoration and shore protection.

Biorock® is a registered trademark of Biorock, Inc. The Biorock Process is owned by Biorock, Inc.

Dear Tom

The Y shape rock breakwaters are excellent here at Clacton.

Question:  I still have a lingering doubt on whether your system will work in the colder seawater of Eastern England (and Scotland.)  

There is a lot of erosion north of me, with houses and farms being lost to the sea with few people caring - it is more like a tourist attraction.

And is the colder water OK for your seagrass and intertidal work?

 We have big tides ( about 9ft), is that OK?
Cheers
John

02/03/2010 00:49

Dear John,

The warmer and saltier the water the better for Biorock, but in cold waters we grow oyster and mussel reefs. We have done pilot projects in Alaska and in Norway north of the Arctic Circle. Large tides are an engineering issue, but can be dealt with.

Rock and concrete breakwaters are inevitable failures, because they increase scour until the collapse and need to be rebuilt. Ours are based on entirely different physical principles, wave refraction instead of reflection, grow back sand beaches and marine habitat, and cost far less. We can make them in any shape, although we have not yet done the Y shape, however we do do W shapes which is close enough. We also restore seagrasses and intertidal grasses, but have not yet had the time to work on mangroves. We won't have time to do so on this project though. 

I'm not sure I get the sandalwood idea. I thought that sandalwood grew on islands with a long dry season, but did not think that they grew in mangroves?

Best wishes,

Tom

GLOBAL CORAL REEF ALLIANCE

A non-profit organization for protection and sustainable management of coral reefs

___________________________________________

Global Coral Reef Alliance, 37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA 02139,  USA

Telephone:       617-864-4226                617-864-0433   

E-mail: goreau@bestweb.net              Web site: http://www.globalcoral.org

March 1 2010

Majuro, Republic of the Marshall Islands, central Pacific Ocean

Thomas J. Goreau, PhD

President, Global Coral Reef Alliance

TSUNAMI LESSONS NOT LEARNED?

Yesterday’s (February 28 2010) massive Magnitude 8.8 Chile earthquake triggered a tsunami alert across the entire Pacific Ocean. Here on Majuro, near the center of the Pacific, we knew big waves were likely headed our way, but had no way to know if they were the massive killer waves that killed 300,000 people in the eastern Indian Ocean on December 26 2004, or if they would be minor. Here in the Marshall Islands, an atoll nation of around 1200 tiny islands with an average height no more than 2 meters above high tide, there is no high ground to run to, and even a fairly small wave could have swept over every island. That happened in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean tsunami, when the waves passed over every island, washing people out to sea. Most managed to swim back to land, but a hundred people were never found. All the groundwater was contaminated with salt, all the bananas (and mangoes on the only island large enough to grow them) died, and people had to wait a year or so for rainwater to flush the salt out before they could grow any food but coconuts again.

The people of every single low lying island in the Pacific have clear memories of terrible times when waves washed clean over their island, when most of the population was carried away, and only a lucky few survived, many by lashing themselves with coconut fibre ropes to breadfruit trees. In many places they can name the date, sometimes this was only a few years or decades ago and the memories are fresh, in other places they lie way back in the times of their grandparents or grandparents’ grandparents, but they are still remembered in oral tradition even though the actual dates are lost. In some cases they lie so far back in time that they have been mythologized as events that happened to the gods. There is probably NO low island without such a tradition.

In Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands, we learned early yesterday morning that a tsunami alert had been called for the entire Pacific. The earthquake in Chile was stronger than the one that triggered the Indian Ocean tsunami. But there is no strong correlation between earthquake strength and tsunamis, very strong earthquakes may have no tsunamis at all. The key is whether they take place along steeply sloping sediments that can undergo sudden landslides. These conditions are common in both Indonesia and Chile, so all we could do was wait and see what happened to other places nearer to Chile as guide.

Hawaii, 3,000 kilometers away, was due to be hit around 2 hours earlier. US TV stations available on satellite links in the Marshall Islands were fixated on Hawaii, large islands where the risk is small because there is plenty of high ground to run to. They never once mentioned any of the atoll islands or their extreme vulnerability. Whether the entire population of the atoll islands lived or died would be of far less importance to the US news media than a few luxury yachts sunk in a Hawaiian harbor with no loss of life. We could see live footage from Honolulu, and when we finally saw how small the waves were, we knew we had lucked out too. We would not risk being killed two hours later. This was fortunate, because the Marshall Islands sat directly in the middle of the most intense high wave height (dark orange) tongue directly in front of the earthquake, while Hawaii lay to the northeast in a much lower wave height area (yellow). The most vulnerable low islands don’t even appear on NOAA’s tsunami map, only high islands!

We knew with two hours reprieve that we would not die that day and would see the next. Here there was no panic all. Small children played in the streets as usual. There were no lines in the stores. Most people probably never even knew their lives might be snuffed out. They are too poor to have cable TV bringing in foreign news. In Hawaii there were sirens blasting away. Here there was no public warning at all. As it turned out, the day of the tsunami alert we had strong winds and waves. On the eastern ocean side of Majuro, where I am living, directly facing the tsunami, the Trade Wind-driven waves were three to four feet high, and so the tsunami was barely noticeable because the waves. The day that began with drama and fear, among that small minority that happened to see the foreign TV (in my case while getting my morning coffee), passed without event, just another day in paradise.

I was supposed to have been at the time not in Majuro, connected to global news media carrying the warnings, but at an outlying atoll, building wave, tidal current, wind, and solar powered shore protection projects to grow coral reefs and allow beaches to grow back on severely eroding islands that are highly threatened by global sea level rise. These islands had suffered catastrophic flooding by high tides that forced hundreds of people out of their homes and caused a national state of emergency a little more than a year ago. Had we been on an outer atoll we would not have been so lucky, for these islands have NO electricity, mail, telephones, or internet, so there would have been no way to know a tsunami was approaching until after it had already hit!

Living to tell the tale because this alert turned out to be a false alarm was nothing more than sheer luck. Another smaller earthquake in Chile, or Hawaii, or any number of other locations could easily trigger a tsunami that would flow right over these islands and thousands of others. The fact that this tsunami did not materialize despite the alert will inevitably be interpreted by the religious as proof of a miracle by their god resulting from their own personal virtue, just as they viewed the Asian tsunami as divine retribution, that their god was punishing others for being sinful, in particular for worshipping other gods than their own.

The sad fact is that here in the central Pacific no lessons were learned about the extreme vulnerability of these islands and the need to strengthen shore defenses by growing back coral reefs to protect their shores. And unfortunately these lessons will probably not be learned until there is a genuine catastrophe. Which will inevitably happen one day, sooner or later, but cannot be predicted in advance. When that happens we will once again be woefully unprepared, and the focus of global attention will once again be on the richest and least vulnerable inhabitants of high islands, and once again the poorest people on the low islands with no place to flee to, who will be the worst affected, will be forgotten. It’s just a matter of time.

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Ending Global Warming

If all new buildings contained vertical axis wind turbines as per my British Patent No. 07 14883.6 and proposed Clacton-on-Sea Iconic Building, we would not need high voltage transmission lines; communities would stand alone – but the changeover will take a century or two, so all we can do is start.

South Australia has the geography, to do much to end global warming.  Australia, with its poor quality soil can store carbon.  ASCAS (below) is worth reading.  First, glance over : Dirt Cheap Dirt: Worms + Cardboard = Soil  By Joe Laur
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“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out….”Worms are creatures that most people would rather not hang out with. They conjure up imagers of slimy, dirty writhing rubbery little creatures that prepubescent boys torment little girls with. Or unsettling reminders that in the end, we all become “worm food”. But the little wrigglers are one of our best friends when it comes to healthy soils and good food. That’s because those night crawlers are waste to resource Olympic athletes. When Ricky Baruch and Deb Habib first moved on to the 30 acres of abandoned land in Orange, Massachusetts that became Seeds of Solidarity farm in 1995, the soils were not the best. Rocky and sandy, they were best suited to the pines and weeds already growing there.

Low on funds and with a lot of land to restore, Deb and Rick put discarded corrugated cardboard from the town dump on the ground to smother the weeds so they could plant and till. But they discovered something remarkable. When they went to remove the cardboard to plant, they found it had worms and a layer of nutrient rich fresh soil below it, produced by the worm castings (nice way to say worm poop), and the microorganisms that thrived in the dark moist environment beneath the cardboard. They decided to plant their seedlings right through cuts in the cardboard, using it as weed cover and to further enrich the soil. They were able to repeat this process on their poor soils year after year, deepening the nutrient rich layer a little more each year. Soon waste cardboard and worms became a keystone of their land reclamation and farming method.

Seems that worms love the environment under the cardboard and eat the stuff itself, working with other organisms to turn ordinary brown corrugated into extraordinary brown soils.

This method for reclaiming waste land and poor soils is very inexpensive- corrugated cardboard can be gotten for free most anywhere, and can be covered with any organic matter- hay, straw, grass clippings, wood chips- you get the picture. The procedure is simple, just put the cardboard right down on the ground where you want to eliminate weeds and create good soil.  Then cover it with hay or woodchips or other mulch to hold it in place. Wait for a few months for the team of earth dwellers to work their magic, and –voila! - good nutritious dirt.

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It follows that all of Australia can be converted into a carbon sink.

When the edges of the Simpson Desert, Australia, are converted (leaving some as wilderness) to fertile nutritious dirt we have a paradigm for the Sahara Desert, Africa – and all other low fertile land.

People, using poor land, earthworms and cardboard, can immediately commence to sequest carbon from the atmosphere.   They only need title to the waste land and a tiny amount of capital to get started.  

The Governments of the World can end global warming any time they want to.

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‘Managing the Carbon Cycle’ Katanning Workshop 21-22 March 2007

www.amazingcarbon.com

Australian Soil Carbon Accreditation Scheme (ASCAS)