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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

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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