For many in the New England region of the United States, the lobster roll is synonymous with summer. Loaded on a toasted bun, the sweet meat chunks are served hot and drenched in butter, or chilled and smeared with celery-herb mayonnaise. The only thing more debated than the recipe is the price: the once humble bun now routinely sells for $30 (£22), or even $50, in a sign of the times and changing seas. Scott Lord, a third-generation lobsterman, spends his days hauling traps in the Gulf of Maine, which is warming faster than 99% of the world’s oceans. “Whether you agree with who’s saying why it’s happening, it’s happening,” he says. Bycatch that was once abundant, such as sea urchins, sand dollars or starfish, is becoming rarer. And most worryingly, Lord has observed that coastal lobster numbers have declined dramatically over the past 15 years, pushing fishermen further and further from shore. Motivated to find a solution, Lord joined a regional seafood committee. “Why aren’t there clams where there used to be clams? Why don’t they come back, no matter what we do?” ask. Hundreds of miles south in Massachusetts, in a curve of sandy land that twists to form Cape Cod, Adam Subhas, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is trying to find the answers. Scott Lord brings his catch of lobsters from traps off the coast; In recent years he has had to go further from the coast to search for shellfish. Lobster rolls at the Lobster Trap Restaurant & Fish Market in Bourne, Massachusetts. Subhas leads LOC-NESS (Locking Ocean Carbon in the North-east Shelf and Slope), an initiative investigating how to decarbonize the ocean, also known as marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR). Scientists working in this field are trying to find out if the ocean, which is estimated to absorb about 31% of atmospheric carbon, could be manipulated to absorb even more. Proponents say removing carbon from the ocean could help stop it. Once a small idea scale is rapidly gaining steam With a flood of US federal investment in 2023 (totaling at least £44m, according to an analysis of The Guardian database), scientific field trials began to catch up until President Trump announced sweeping cuts to all federally funded ocean science, Adam Subhas, who runs the LOC-NESS programme, among lobster larvae at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution laboratory in Massachusetts. LOC-NESS is the latest “unicorn” for carbon removal in the US oceans. It is testing the technique that has gained the most support in recent years: ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE). Its central principle is to stimulate seawater to absorb more atmospheric carbon by dispersing alkaline materials over a wide area of the ocean. Working 40 miles off the coast of Boston, in the Wilkinson Basin of the Gulf of Maine, last summer, the team. Subhas put about 65,000 liters of sodium hydroxide into the sea. The highly alkaline material was mixed with a red dye to facilitate tracking by sensors and satellites. Subhas, left, and Kate Morkeski prepare to launch a net to collect plankton from their research ship during field tests to improve the ocean’s alkalinity. [up]”We have to understand how this could work in the open sea too,” says Subhas, who has a stuffed toy of the Loch Ness Monster sitting on a shelf in his lab next to scientists’ bible, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. The team used a fleet of ships and monitored alkalinity and carbon uptake for four days via autonomous underwater vehicles that provided highly sensitive measurements. “For a while, there has been a scientific debate about whether some of them could even be measured. these “Signals,” says Subhas, who presented his findings at this year’s Ocean Sciences Meeting. He believes they can provide a roadmap for how alkalinity improvement can be measured and modeled in the future. Three ships participated in the LOC-NESS project’s successful OAE test in the Gulf of Maine, which included observers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Massachusetts state fisheries agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the fishing industry Adam Subhas, right, and Jennie Rheuban sample a CTD probe, which collects samples that allow scientists to measure the temperature, salinity, oxygen and acidity of seawater at different depths. Right, an autonomous glider with sensors to measure the alkalinity of the sea. “We need to be very clear about the need for large-scale emissions reductions and, at the same time, uncover the science behind some of these newer approaches that could help complement those large-scale reductions in the future,” Subhas says. In Hole’s laboratories, you can hear the noise of alkaline water being pumped into machines that analyze dissolved inorganic carbon in the background. Lobsters and alkalinity Drawing on data collected last summer, the team is examining two years of testing to understand how sea creatures respond to different levels of alkalinity. After initial biological studies on species at the base of the food web, such as phytoplankton, the team is now focusing on lobsters. It is a species that generates the second highest value of any seafood. They will land in the United States, representing just under $700 million (around £550 million) in 2023. They will then move on to tautog fish, a popular species for sport fishing. The design of the experiment had its own challenges. Lobsters are very sensitive during molting, they don’t like temperatures above 20°C (68°F) and “unfortunately, they will eat each other, if given the chance,” says Chris Murray, a marine biologist who built special floating mesh cups to prevent cannibalism Chloe Dean, a researcher, evaluates the biological impacts of higher alkalinity. Preliminary laboratory results showed no increased mortality or behavioral changes after exposure to elevated pH and alkalinity. So far, Murray and his team have not observed any lethal effects with high or low levels of alkalinity, but they will analyze the lobsters’ RNA, the molecular building block of all cellular functions, at the end of the tests to better understand their physiological response. In particular, its ability to secrete waste. Describing these studies as the “tip of the iceberg,” Murray says the next step in this experimentation would involve creating a mini ecosystem with many marine species. “We need to do this research,” he says, “it’s really important to weigh these impacts against what is predicted to happen in the ocean. We know that ocean warming is going to be a major disruptive force for marine food webs.” Can European funding save the day? Luckily for researchers, there is still a ray of hope on the other side of the Atlantic. Just as U.S. funding abruptly stopped, Europe began increasing its academic grants to study marine carbon dioxide removal. According to analysis of Ocean Carbon Renewal Watch data, the European Union has disbursed more than £8.5 million in grants in the last two years, distributing funds to more than 20 universities in Britain and the rest of Europe. At the University of Gothenburg, Sam Dupont, a senior lecturer who studies the effects of ocean acidification and warming on marine ecosystems, was encouraged by this new stream of funding. By studying the alkalinity thresholds of sea urchins, mussels and fish eggs, he is beginning two years of experimentation in Sweden and Iceland, where he is working with the country’s Marine and Freshwater Research Institute to see how alkalinity affects the same species in different bodies of water. “We want to cover a lot of different creatures,” he says, “We see that if the alkalinity gets too high, something goes wrong in their physiology and they develop abnormally and die.” An underwater glider with Amanda Pinson, of Woods Hole’s geochemistry and marine chemistry department, and Patrick Deane, an engineer in Dupont’s physical oceanography department, fears that private industry is beginning to attract funding for large-scale experiments by issuing credits for ocean carbon removal. The commercial scale is “ready to take the leap, but we don’t understand how [OAE] “The equivalent would be: smoke a cigarette and go to the doctor the next day and say, ‘There’s no effect on cancer,'” says Dupont, who estimates it will be about a decade before scientists can establish precisely what safe alkalinity thresholds are for marine life. He spent three decades studying iron fertilization, which adds iron to the ocean to stimulate plankton growth, i.e. sequestering carbon, until his US Department of Energy (DoE) grant was suspended mid-last year and, he says, only about half of the promised $5 million was paid out. Researchers learned about a new phase of funding last winter, but “none of them came to fruition,” Buesseler says. Buesseler is also leading an ambitious project called Ex-OIS, which is in the early stages of seeking permission to study iron fertilization more than 400 miles off the coast of Alaska. It would be the first company to have gone through national and international regulatory processes. But with little to no funding opportunities in the U.S., it’s hard to imagine it attracting the $30 million needed to launch the experiment in 2028. “I feel like we’re just kicking the can down the road,” says Buesseler, who believes these geoengineering techniques should be used in conjunction with fossil fuel reduction. “The climate crisis won’t go away because we stop funding research into ocean solutions, so the problem will be with us. It’s increasingly difficult to address.” This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center and with the support of an Alicia Patterson fellowship.
