For four days last August, the waters 50 miles off the Massachusetts coast turned maroon. On purpose.
Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) pumped 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide — tagged with a red dye for tracking — into the Gulf of Maine as part of the LOC-NESS project, the first large-scale open-water test of ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE). The experiment, licensed by the US EPA, took place in an area commonly fished for cod, haddock, and lobster.
What They Found
Early results, announced at the AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting in Glasgow, are striking:
- Up to 10 tonnes of CO₂ entered the ocean during the five-day observation period
- Local pH rose from 7.95 to 8.3 — effectively restoring alkalinity to preindustrial levels at the deployment site
- No significant harm to plankton, fish larvae, or lobster larvae was observed
The team used autonomous gliders, long-range underwater vehicles, and shipboard sensors to trace how the alkaline plume dispersed.
Why This Matters
The ocean already holds roughly 38,000 billion tonnes of carbon as dissolved bicarbonate. OAE works by boosting this natural alkalinity — essentially accelerating a geological process that normally takes millennia. If it scales, OAE could simultaneously remove atmospheric CO₂ and counteract ocean acidification, which is now higher than at any point in the past million years.
Several OAE startups are already selling verified carbon credits through registries like Isometric. But LOC-NESS represents something different: independent, EPA-permitted science generating the baseline data the field needs.
The Pushback
Not everyone is cheering. Friends of the Earth US called the approach “profoundly concerning,” citing risks of “catastrophic unforeseen consequences” at scale. The debate over chemical intervention in ocean systems isn’t going away.
But as lead oceanographer Adam Subhas pointed out: we’re already conducting an uncontrolled experiment on the climate. The question isn’t whether to intervene — it’s whether to do so with data or without.
What’s Next
The LOC-NESS results haven’t yet been peer-reviewed, and the experiment measured impacts on larvae but not adult fish or marine mammals. Scaling from 65,000 litres to ocean-scale deployment is a leap that will require far more ecological monitoring. But for a field that’s been heavy on theory and light on open-water data, this is a significant step forward.
Source: The Guardian · LOC-NESS Project