Seeding steel frames brings destroyed coral reefs back to life | Hacker News Reader

Seeding steel frames brings destroyed coral reefs back to life

arstechnica.com

72 pointswesturner29 comments

Really expected a picture of the steel Reef Stars with the article.

Found the site from the sponsors of the project. Bit of a surprise, the Mars, is Mars Candy Bars (M&Ms, Snickers, ect...) Also, a partnership over in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef using the stars. (348 Reef Stars with 5,115 coral fragments of opportunity) Both have fairly extensive pictures of the steel frames coated with sand and the installation.

The main MARRS stats are: "30 sites across ten countries, 60,000 Reef Stars, planting 900,000+ living coral fragments."

Apparently started with "10 years in Sulawesi, Indonesia to restore reefs damaged by dynamite fishing."

[1] https://www.mars.com/news-and-stories/articles/the-big-build...

[2] https://www.gbrbiology.com/2022/04/08/mars-and-coral-rubble-...

The company is using as a promotional tool for their cat food brand and named the Indonesian site after the brand. I would not say they are a particularly ecologically friendly brand.

While there is no doubt that stabilising rubble is an important factor in reef recovery (especially where this is the primary issue, such as in blast fishing sites), IMO this technology is milkdrop in the universe stuff once you pull heating oceans into the equation.

As an aside, the Great Barrier Reef is currently in the midst of an unprecedented fifth mass coral bleaching event since 2016.

I remmeber the conversation i had with a guy whos job it was to lobby the government in behalf of mining companies for new mining sites. His words were exactly "No project i lobby wont get approved, its just worth too much money to too many people. And dont complain to me about the environment destruction of the mines when you cant exist without your lighting and gas at home." "Corel doesnt make me money. I dont care about dead corel reefs, by the time they all die they will have found out a way to grow them back quickly and everything will be good again".

So thats the ideaology of the people who work in this space. This person lobbied for the largest mining companies in Aus. I guess it really was a preminiation of today, when the GBR has finally shrunk enough to have more uses to corperations then simply being a tailings pond. Now they can leech the funding being earmarked for recovering the reef that they killed. Win win! Money talks. Rare us is ok, but really rare, now thats were the money is at.

There’s a Canadian guy who discovered back in the 1980’s gentle electrolysis can create artificial coral.

He was getting funding to try to raise an atol off Madagascar as recently as ten (ed: twenty) years ago, shortly before he passed.

Someone more recently thought they found that electrical potential attracts coral polyps, so perhaps the “electrolysis” was less chemical and more biological.

When I hear about steel to creat coral I think of galvanic action.

It is interesting to think about how much could be done to mitigate human impact on various ecosystems if we humans had an improved grasp on animal senses. Recommendable: “An Immense World” by Ed Yong

https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal/dp...

>so perhaps the “electrolysis” was less chemical and more biological.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biorock it's chemical:

> The chemical process that takes place on the cathode is as follows: Calcium carbonate (aragonite) combines with magnesium, chloride and hydroxyl ions to slowly accrete around the cathode coating it with a thick layer of material similar in composition to magnesium oxychloride cement. Over time cathodic protection replaces the negative chloride ion (Cl-) with dissolved bicarbonate (HCO3-) to harden the coating to a hydromagnesite-aragonite mixture with gaseous oxygen evolving through the porous structure.

But it does seem the process creates an environment that's very beneficial for coral growth in general.

That’s what he claimed but I don’t think he updated his research. Which is why I said “more recently”

- "Playing sounds of healthy coral on reefs makes fish return" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36450824#36465577 and other Coral Restoration links

I wonder if anyone could explain the reef-are-fine idea (https://www.australianenvironment.org/gbr-report-2024) that seems to contradict the climate-change -> bleaching -> no more reefs idea. It looks like crackpottery and is promoted by one former academic. But he was fired for talking about it so that suggests the climate-change idea is politically enforced and thus also untrustworthy. So is Peter Ridd wrong on something or are they orthogonal issues or what?

To resume in a couple of paragraphs the outcome of a very complex and chaotic system, concerning thousands of different species is not realistic. Just assume that this is only a raw simplification.

Bleaching is caused by more than one factor. Corals are an antique, diverse and rich group of organisms and they know a few tricks about survival for millions of years.

‘But he was fired for talking about it’ is a rather bold claim. Many people get fired who didn’t promote fringe ideas, but claiming you got fired for exposing some big lie is great publicity. I would suggest looking for evidence before assuming someone is telling the truth when they say such things.

As to bleaching it’s not an every year or every reef thing. The general consensus in terms of recent events only 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2022 had wide scale impacts and there’s quite a bit of recovery between those dates and many areas that aren’t impacted. However, more frequent bad years has impacts not just on the ecosystem but also tourism. EX: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/04/10/2016-2017_gbrble...

Minor omission, but you missed 2024 from your list of mass bleaching events. Though I guess it's too early for consensus as to the scale of the impact.

As far as I can tell, he really was fired to talking about it. That included criticizing other organizations that promoted bleaching catastrophism. Though the direct reason was publishing confidential information about his own disciplining for, as I understand it, saying things publicly.

It's not like he stole office equipment or other unrelated things.

> Because this loose rubble is in constant motion, tumbling and rolling around, coral larvae don’t have enough time to grow before they get squashed. So the first step to bringing damaged reefs back to life was stabilizing the rubble. The people running the MARS program did this using Reef Stars, hexagonal steel structures coated with sand. “These structures are connected into networks and pinned to the seabed to reduce the movement of the rubble,” Lamont said.

This may lend support to not-quite the-same-as-steel-framing, but vastly more benign compared to other strategies like aerosol seeding :

"Ocean iron fertilization (OIF), an ocean-based geoengineering technique, aims to increase the rate of atmospheric CO2 transfer to the deep ocean by stimulating the biological pump through the addition of iron (a key nutrient) to the surface of the ocean."

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R47172.pdf

These rubble stabilisers solve a legecy problem affecting coral reefs, namely how to produce a solid substrate for coral to grow on, at an infitessimilly small relative scale.

The problem is that they do little for the problem affecting coral reefs, namely warming waters and acidification.

They're equivalent to nail clippers for a person with cancer.

Returning from French Polynesia it seems like coral engineering has made a lot of progress in the last dozen years.

surely there's no easily seen problems being ignored in the rush to "do good" here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef

steel and saltwater are kinda known to have problems

From "Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37726539&p=3#37728049 :

>> Years of creating artificial reefs from old tires are catching up.

> People probably don't even realize that most tires are synthetic rubber and thus are also bad for the ocean.

> Is there a program to map the locations of old synthetic tire reefs, and what is a suitable replacement for reef reconstruction and regrowth?

I really hate this kind of brainless driveby pessimism. Look up the steel frames they're using; they're tiny. The amount of steel being added to the ocean by this project is absolutely inconsequential compared to the steel added by innumerable other human activities. Even shipping containers falling off ships dwarfs this project, let alone ships themselves sinking. Furthermore, we have decades of experience that tells us that corals and fish quite like steel shipwrecks, debris, etc. What's more, the frames they're using demonstrably do work as scaffolding for coral growth; it's not an untested idea.

the problems i allude to involve the steel no longer being steel within a very short time after hitting the water. As with the wiki reference, stuff you're expecting to pin together with steel will likely not stay together.

It's not pessimism to say "this could be done better; we've seen the methods being used fail repeatedly before"

Presumably they don’t have to be around for too long though as they will be replaced by coral once their job is done? Your comment did seem needlessly pessimistic to me, and was absent any specialist knowledge of the engineering involved in this project that might have justified it.

How could it be done better?

Could they be made from under spec for other applications steel?

There's not yet an awesome-coral restoration markdown README.md; or any mentions of both "MARRS" and "Reef Cubes".

Do coral prefer steel to other materials like concrete, sargassumcrete, hempcrete, sugarcrete, formed CO2, or IDK cellulose; and can you just add iron to the mix or what do coral prefer?

Can RUVs and robots deploy coral scaffolding safely at scale underwater?

What other shapes would solve?

"Researchers create green steel from toxic red mud in 10 minutes" (2024) https://newatlas.com/materials/toxic-baulxite-residue-alumin... :

> Researchers have turned the red mud waste from aluminum production into green steel

Perhaps green steel for steel coral reef scaffolding

The steel isn’t structure, the coral is.

The steel is scaffolding.

It does not matter. Steel will rush and disappear in a few decades, but its main purpose in the meanwhile is blocking trawls and pirate fishing

Plankton growth is limited to iron availability. We’ve talked about spraying rust on the ocean surface to drop global temperatures.

In addition to a few ill-considered projects to make reefs out of used tires, many tens of thousands of steel-hulled ships have been scuttled in tropical waters.

It's fine.

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