Why 'seaweed is definitely having a moment'
Most people have experienced seaweed during a visit to the beach or as part of a meal of sushi. Seaweed is also an ingredient in many other everyday items people normally wouldn't consider -- like ice cream, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. They've even used seaweed to build housing in many parts of the world.
But it's seaweed's ability to offset carbon and its regenerative properties for ocean ecosystems that has researchers everywhere talking.
"Roughly 30 million tons of seaweed is grown globally each year for all sorts of different things. Luke Gardner, a biologist with the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, focuses on research and education in the field of aquaculture, and he is intensely familiar with the variety of uses for seaweed.
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Seaweed salad rolls. (Photo credit: Getty images) |
"Seaweed is definitely having a moment," Gardner told AccuWeather in an interview. "People are particularly excited about the potential of seaweed and what it can do for our environment."
New research shows that while forests have long been considered the best natural defense in the battle against climate change, seaweed is actually the most effective natural way of absorbing carbon emissions from the atmosphere.
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Luke Gardner, Ph.D., Aquaculture Specialist, California Sea Grant, |
Unlike tree planting, seaweed does not require freshwater or fertilizers. Plus, seaweed grows ... well, like a weed. Its growth rate can reach an astounding 2 feet a day. Most importantly, seaweed doesn't compete for demands on land.
"When we're planting trees, we need to make sure it does not take away that land from food production. But that is not an issue with seaweed," Katie Lebling, a researcher with the World Resources Institute's carbon removal team, told Time magazine in an interview last year.
Although seaweed is algae and not a plant, like land plants, seaweed plays a huge role in absorbing carbon emissions in a process called carbon sequestration.
With more C02 into the atmosphere, a catalyst of climate change, the ocean serves as a kind of huge sinkhole that soaks it up and through a chemical process, releases hydrogen ions that make the ocean more acidic. Generally, the ocean is a very stable environment, so even slight changes in the pH balance can have devastating impacts on the animals, plants and algae that live there.
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(Photo credit: Getty images) |
"Seaweed can help reverse that because just like you would've heard about carbon sequestration on land with forestry, the same can happen with seaweed in the ocean. Seaweed is photosynthetic, so it can suck up that CO2 and store it within its body," Gardner explained to AccuWeather.
Seaweed can keep the C02 sequestered for long periods of time which can reverse ocean acidifcation and also be beneficial to the atmosphere, "which is beneficial to the ocean in that we're reversing ocean acidification, but also beneficial to the atmosphere, because we're taking extra CO2 out of the atmosphere that is not contributing to global warming," Gardner said.
Seaweed is separated into three colors; reds, browns and greens, and there are as many as 12,000 different species. Seaweed farming mostly occurs in Asian countries like Japan, North and South Korea and Indonesia. According to Time, people have been farming seaweed for thousands of years with China being the world's biggest producer of seaweed, accounting for 60% of global volume."
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Seaweed farm at sea in Xiapu County, China. It's largest area for growth seaweed at sea surface. |
As interest in seaweed as a food source, carbon sink option as well as a renewable product has exploded, production has doubled over the past decade with an estimated value of $59.61 billion in 2019.
Most recently, researchers have discovered that a certain type of seaweed can also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in other ways. Adding a red algal species of seaweed called Asparagopsis taxiformis to cattle feed can potentially reduce methane production from beef cattle by up to 99%. Gardner, who also happens to be a cattle rancher, is especially excited about this development.
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Seaweed is gaining popularity as a health snack for kids, one of the many ways that illustrates its versatility. |
He cited recent research that he said shows that certain types of seaweed, if fed to cows, can decrease their output of methane gas.
Some seaweeds "can reduce their methane levels by 80 percent, 99 percent in some cases," he said. "That's a really cool area of research and people are working out how it works in these in these animals, in particular cows, but they're also trying to scratch their head about how we can grow this type of seaweed."
Louis Druehl, 84, was the first commercial seaweed operator in North America when he began growing kelp, a brown seaweed, in 1982. He believes seaweed farming could happen on a global scale but says it's up to governments, companies and consumers to grow the industry. "We're moving along very nicely technologically. We know that seaweed can improve many aspects of our life," Druehl told Time. "But I don't think things are working in a parallel fashion in the political and social world."
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