Deep Water-fertilized, Open Ocean Seaweed Mariculture: A Field Study
2023 Faculty Research Award
AWARD PERIOD: 2023-2025
Daniel Sigman, the Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences, will lead research to characterize the carbon and nutrient budgets of a “deep water-fertilized, open ocean seaweed mariculture” (DWFS) platform in the Camotes Sea, off the Philippines. DWFS platforms are designed to cultivate seaweeds in open ocean surface waters. These seaweeds, in turn, are used commercially for food, feed, fertilizer, fiber, biofuel and the long-term sequestration of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. In particular, the researchers will assess the effectiveness of these platforms for carbon sequestration by quantifying the fractions of seaweed carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus exported to ocean depths as opposed to being cycled into the surface ocean ecosystem.
HMEI summer interns, senior thesis students, and graduate students will travel to the Philippines to collect samples and undertake laboratory analysis. Insights from the project will be discussed in Sigman’s course “Climate: Past, Present and Future.”
Participating Departments
Faculty
