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More monitoring needed as oceans are considered for CO2 storage

As the need to address climate change becomes more desperate, many believe the world’s oceans may be able to help.

About a quarter of the world’s human-made carbon dioxide emissions are already absorbed in marine environments, and a rapidly emerging industry is counting on the potential for more. Ocean-based carbon dioxide removal ideas include planting vast fields of kelp, fertilizing the ocean with iron to boost plankton production, and even pumping alkaline solutions into the water to increase the oceans’ natural ability to absorb carbon.  

“It’s not enough just to stop emissions,” said Natalie Monacci, a chemical oceanographer at the UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. “We also need to remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reach our climate goals.”

Monacci, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting this week, argues that such efforts to store carbon dioxide in oceans should be accompanied by a robust monitoring program. Do those gases really stay in the water? For how long? How does that affect the marine environment?

The ability to do that testing already exists at laboratories like UAF’s Ocean Acidification Research Center, which can analyze carbon dioxide and pH levels in seawater. Monitoring, reporting and verification is crucial as groups consider new ways to pump atmospheric carbon into the oceans, Monacci said.

Monacci is a co-author of the global carbon budget, released last month at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “The accounting is hard,” she said. “We need a lot of people to add up the numbers to determine if the removal plans do what they claim.”