Divers Are Attempting To Regrow Great Barrier Reef With Electricity (newscientist.com) 23
A trial is underway to restore damaged coral on the Great Barrier Reef using electricity. From a report: The reef has been severely assaulted in recent years by cyclones and back-to-back heatwaves. Nathan Cook at conservation group Reef Ecologic and his colleagues are attempting to regrow surviving coral fragments on steel frames. The frames are placed on damaged parts of the reef and stimulated with electricity to accelerate the coral's growth. Electrified metal frames have previously been used to encourage coral growth on reefs in South-East Asia, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. They have been shown to attract mineral deposits that help corals grow 3 to 4 times faster than normal. The technique is being trialed at a section of the reef 100 kilometres north of Cairns that was badly affected by the 2016 and 2017 mass coral bleaching events. Some coral is starting to grow back naturally, but it will take at least a decade for even the fastest-growing species to fully recover.
Sounds like a giant waste of electricity (Score:1)
Like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic
Climate change is going to make the destruction so far look like child's play
Oh sure! (Score:5, Funny)
"Divers" are allowed to zap the Great Barrier reef to keep it alive, but when I taze homeless people to make sure they're still alive, suddenly it's a crime?!?
Re: (Score:1)
Homeless people aren't an endangered species.
It's electric! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My sacrificial anode is a coral reef, and nobody can figure out if they're supposed to be mad at me or not.
It's alive! (Score:3)
Coral Reef Documentaries (Score:3)
I'm sure there are others [imdb.com] I've missed but these two stood out:
* Netflix has a great documentary called Mission Blue [netflix.com]
* National Geographic's Australia's Great Barrier Reef [youtube.com] is also good.
Re: Leave it alone (Score:1)
Nano scale experiments are how we learn.
Imagine this
1000 miles of corals dead and gone forever due to a bleaching. But a mile of farm as a protected area could contain a snapshot of nearly the entire biodiversity. So when the event happens, you have a coral seed bank.
How will Abbot Point be affected by this? (Score:1)
If the Great Barrier Reef gets electricied, will Adani have to stop dumping waste from the Carmichael coal mine into the Coral Sea?