August 19, 2024 — Cape Cod scientists are delaying a geoengineering project that looks to dump more than 60,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide into the ocean and has caught federal concerns around potential impacts on the ecosystem.
Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth have pushed back the project from mid-September to next summer because they say a fully-equipped research vessel is no longer available.
Woods Hole’s decision to delay became public two days after the National Marine Fisheries published a warning last Monday that the project could “adversely affect federally-managed species and other NOAA trust resources.”
The experiment, consisting of two phases, would dump sodium hydroxide and freshwater into the Atlantic, temporarily changing the water’s chemistry – increasing carbon dioxide levels that the ocean absorbs.
Scientists say it’s an effort that could be a way to slow climate change in the long run.
The first phase of the so-called LOC-NESS project, short for “Locking away Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope,” would release 6,600 gallons of sodium hydroxide solution roughly 10 miles south of Normans Land, an island off of Martha’s Vineyard.
The release of the solution would occur over two to three hours to “create a patch of alkalinity on the ocean surface and then monitored for up to 5 days by an on-site scientific research team,” according to project documents.
In the second phase, pushed back to 2026, scientists would dump up to 66,000 gallons into the Wilkinson Basin, nearly 40 miles northeast of Provincetown.