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A Solution for Coral Reefs in Peril
Alien54 writes "At the recent Coral Reef Symposium in Bali, Indonesia, scientists concluded that most of the world's ocean reefs have been killed or severely damaged with the remainder in certain jeopardy. Disastrous reverses in reef health threaten marine biodiversity, tourism, fisheries and shore protection worldwide. Reefs die for many reasons: rising water temperatures, sewage flows, eutrophication, disease, and negligence. A reef ecosystem that took hundreds of years to grow can be destroyed in a single afternoon by dredging, dynamite or cyanide fishing. But there is a solution. In pilot installations in Mexico, Panama, Indonesia, Maldives, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea, artificial reefs have been built where corals grow rapidly even in stressed environments. Applying a low voltage electrical current (completely safe for swimmers and marine life) to a submerged conductive structure causes dissolved mineral crystals in seawater to preciptate and adhere to that structure. Surviving coral fragments are mechanically attached, and end up doing very well indeed. During the 1998 warming, fewer than 5% of the natural reef corals survived. But on the artificial reefs, 80% of corals not only survived, they flourished. Corals from these reefs are now recolonizing the surrounding natural habitats."
Isn't this just like sinking a ship to make a new reef, just that here instead of using an explosion to kick off decomposition, they're doing it electrically?? And with the sunken ships there's an "instant structure"....
UK Laptops
Anyway, that pretty much sums up my pointless story. But it is very cool to see this 20+ year old idea actually used for something beneficial.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Australia has an amazing reef (which i've seen as part of a tour many years ago and it was amazing), the Great Barrier Reef. It's the worlds largest reef, and can even be seen from space.
Unfortunately it is also under threat now due to pollution, although the Australian authorities are trying to preserve it.
Healthy corals grow quickly--up to ten times faster than normal when exposed to the Biorock Process, even in poor water conditions.
Could this possibly be used in aquariums? It would be interesting to grow corals in an accellerated rate in an aquarium.
I guess I'll switch my usual Filet-O-Fish for a Big Mac.
Indeed. A few years back, I was working with an NGO out in Ghana, West Africa. One day, seeing all of the piles of dried fish for sale in the market, I asked one of my local friends how they caught so many fish. He replied "Oh, its simple. They pour DDT into a lake, all of the fish float to the surface".
I was shocked; I asked him whether they knew that DDT was nasty stuff, and in particular a cumulative poison. He said "Yes", but pointed out that the economics of the situation, versus the fact that the poison wasn't concentrated enough in any given fish to kill someone outright, meant that DDT fishing was still commonly practiced.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
the slowing of reef growth has something to do with earth's waning magnetic field and this occurs naturally right before a pole flip?
Maybe the reason tank raised corals grow so well in home aquariums but dont propagate as easily in the wild is because with all those corals in proximity to each other in such a small water space they exchange the symbiotic bacteria quicker that allows them to tolerate more difficult conditions. i see some of my corals releasing them every night as brown stringy waste but to see them reuptaked into other corals you would need a microscope.
Maybe its the fratellis.
Maybe chunk found the police!
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
I had this "Future Technologies" book when I was a kid, and it explained how we could create pressure-safe undersea domes using this exact technology. Steel grid dome, apply electricity, wait for the minerals, then wait for the coral, eventually you'd have a water-tight, hollow dome. I think this book also talked about a nuclear reactor in every home, so maybe it wasn't 100% accurate. Still, nice to see some technologies actually being applied.
Nicer still, if the philosophical evil which teaches people that causality is merely an arbitrary construct could be abolished. Then maybe these cyanide and dynamite fishers would learn that you cannot both have and eat your cake.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Since artificial reefs are usually sunken wrecks I wonder if the iron constantly leaching out of these wrecks is the key element to the reefs vigor. I know oceanographers have found that sea water is generally very iron poor and that experiments with iron "seeding" have produced phytoplankton blooms.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
turn people into reefs.
http://www.eternalreefs.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
No just ships. New Jersey used/is using decommissioned subway cars to build an artificial reef.
Do not touch -Willie
And human greed is unnatural in precisely what way, exactly? You didn't answer the parents question, you simply passed a moral judgement that not killing an elephant is morally superior to you.
Lions don't have to kill an elephant; they can kill a gazelle for survival.
So, do the Tiger's animal rights take precedence over the Elephant's animal rights?
The truth is, this whole argument basically boils down to various schools of thought on how mankind should manage the planet. Unfortunately, the hard-core environmental movement refuses to acknowledge this, instead preaching the mantra that any environmental policy other than theirs is destructive and harmful to the planet.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I coached high school debaters on their ocean topic last year, and artificial coral reefs were a popular point of contention. I won't really go into detail here, but don't rely on that website as your source of information. The Coral Reef Taskforce is nothing more than a front for the creators of BioRock. The whole webpage is a large advertisement. Other makers of artificial reefs and many professional scuba diving organizations also don't really care for BioRock because it is ugly, expensive, and potentially dangerous (I guess there's a risk of shock).
In any case, I'd love to see solutions put in place to save coral reefs, but I'm not so desperately enthusiastic that I'll heed the words of a website infomercial that proclaim BioRock to be the best solution.
Even the general "slap on the wrist" fines that offenders receive for polluting hardly stem the tide when costs for ridding themselves of waste properly are "too high".
That's because we don't set the fines according to sane economic principles. We set them as a slap on the wrist, forgetting that in esscence, a corporation is a sociopath, so that we cannot appeal effectively to 'the right thing'. The fine is seen as nothing more than the low bidder on the disposal problem. Just bpart of the cost of doing business.
The correct formula for the fine is Cr/p+Cc where Cr is the cost of proper disposal, p is the probability of being caught, and Cc is the ACTUAL cost of cleanup AND proper disposal. No exceptions even if we have to liquidate the company to do it. That way, doing the wrong thing will always average out to being at least twice as expensive as doing it right. Doing it right becomes the low bidder.
Before the far right inevitably objects that liquidating the company is bad for the economy, think of the big boost it will be for the cleanup and disposal industries.
The article doesn't really explain why the growth was better on the artificial reefs. Is it due to the electric current somehow stimulating coral growth?
Or perhaps it's due to the fact that these structures are very open and allow a lot of water flow throughout the structure of the reef (thus allowing greater nutrient flow to the corals).
The attachement argument alone doesn't seem to be the only explanation: I use super-glue to attach corals in my aquarium and that works very quickly.
Perhaps similar effects could be acheived by slight electrical stimulation of already existing reefs? More experimentation needs to be done.
I hope that they're right, however, in their observations. It would be great if we could save some reefs. Coral reefs are among the most beautiful and diverse eco systems on the planet. It would be a shame to lose them because of our carelessness.
I remember reading in my college Chemistry book about a similar process in which one could literally "grow" concrete slabs by submerging an electrically-charged mesh into a calcium/mineral-rich solution (a.k.a. ocean water).
Anyone else hear of this more recently?
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.