Could lightening clouds save the Great Barrier Reef from climate change?

T o Nicely, the Great Barrier Reef has not known a good year. A 2016 heat wave killed 29% of the coral reef, and the pace of climate change shows no signs of slowing down. But the original idea of ​​a scientist can buy a little more time at the Great Barrier Reef – and that's a very great idea.

Daniel Harrison, Ph.D., a researcher at the Sydney Institute of Marine Sciences, proposes that would make the clouds over the Great Barrier Reef shinier and more reflective to bounce back more sunlight from the Earth. This, he says, could help keep the water around the reef warm up quickly and whiten the coral. To accomplish this inconceivable task, Harrison proposes to spray seawater on the clouds, where the salt molecules of the water would encourage water to condense around them. Theoretically, the higher salt content in the clouds would make them brighter than your average clouds. Since atmospheric water droplets have to condense around 19459008 to form clouds, Harrison says that salt in the seawater – which will leave the water behind him while giant fans blow in the air – will provide the necessary particles to the clouds. "On earth, there is a lot of dust and everything," says Harrison at the Chinese News Agency Xinhua . "Above the ocean they are largely formed by sea salt." The idea is that we take sea water and vaporize it as these droplets Nanometric size evaporates, leaving the crystal of sea salt. "This sounds ambitious, but Harrison explains that this urgent matter calls for creative solutions.

" [Losing the reef] is not something that will happen in future generations, it's now in this generation if we do not act now, "he said the Sydney Morning Herald Monday." It's really scary. "

It is not the only one to think that the reef is in immediate danger, and it is not the only one to search desperately for answers."

An article published in April 1945 in PLOS Genetics suggests that some corals of the Great Barrier Reef evolve to survive in warmer waters, climate change may be moving too fast to keep the reefs up. Another article published in April in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that scientists could use the CRISPR / Cas9 gene editing to improve beneficial traits in coral but the results of this team were mixed. genetic changes would remain in future generations once altered coral is released into the wild. The so-called "in vitro fertilization with corals" has yielded promising results, but it will not help prevent future bleaching and death

Since no one was born there. found answers Due to the threat posed by ocean warming and climate change, even strange ideas like cloud lightening are seriously taken into consideration. Harrison represents a growing body of scientists who argue that geoengineering projects like this one could be the best hope for saving the Great Barrier Reef.

In an article published in June 2017 in the journal Earth & # 39; s Future a team of atmospheric scientists proposed that thinning clouds could be feasible but they also pointed out that scientists had to design controlled experiments to test the strategy. The first author, Rob Wood, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, said in a statement. By "aerosol", it means the particles sprayed in the air – as in Harrison's idea about seawater. "A controlled test would measure the extent to which we are able to change clouds, and test an important component of climate models, "said Wood.

One of the main problems identified by Wood and his colleagues is that it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of the lightening of aerosol clouds, since the Global climate research can not adequately disentangle the effects of aerosol cooling from other factors. For this reason, they called for small-scale controlled experiments to see how much a solution such as thinning clouds could really change things.