Transcript:

Kelp Elevator

Ambience: Ocean waves, underwater sounds
Kelp is a fast-growing algae seaweed. On Catalina Island off the California coast, a group of scientists are working on a kind of kelp elevator. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet .

Heidelberg: What we're trying to do here at the Marine Institute, we're working in collaboration with a for-profit private company called Marine Bioenergy and with the Pacific Northwest National Lab. We're trying to figure out if it's possible to grow kelp for biofuels, in the open ocean.

John Heidelberg is the Associate Director of the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and a principal investigator for Earthwatch.

Heidelberg: So one of the major issues with growing kelp in the open ocean is, the ocean's actually a stratified environment, where at the surface of the ocean, there's lots of light, but it's stratified, so the nutrient levels are greatly depleted. So the theory is, that we want to study if it's possible to take kelp on to a raising-and-lowering system in the open ocean, to bring them up to the surface in the sunlight during the day. And then at night, take them down into the deep ocean, where the nutrients are, in order to pick up nutrients and keep cycling that in the open ocean, on autonomous vehicles.
Here, what we're looking at is the basic science behind if that's even possible. And we're doing that with something called a kelp elevator. And the kelp elevator is there to test whether the kelp can survive that cycling of up and down in the open ocean, in a controlled system on a buoy off the island of Catalina.

So the ultimate goal of this is to be able to grow and harvest kelp, and use that biomass in the production of a biofuel that can actually be used to, in the transportation industry, to fuel vehicles.

We'll hear more on kelp in future programs. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Check out our new podcast at astoundinguniverse.com.