MELBOURNE – World Oceans Day is June 8th, and scientists have unveiled a new robot to help fight climate change.
A not-so-secret weapon in the battle against climate change in hiding in waters around the world, pools of algae which scientists say can take a big bite out of carbon.
“We’ve got so much of it in the atmosphere, we need to be taking it out of the atmosphere, putting it into products,” says professor Peter Ralph, a marine biologist at University of Technology Sydney.
But not algae is the same. “We’ve got 300,000 species to choose from, we’ve got to start picking the winners very quickly,” says Ralph.
To find those winners, researchers in Australia designed a robot to detect what’s called “super algae” – a special species that sucks carbon out of the air 40 times more efficiently than trees.
The brainy bot sorts through the algae quicker and cheaper than doing it by hand. “It does the work of 20 scientists in a single year,” says Dr. Eddie Custovic, a senior engineer at Photon Systems Instruments.
Plus, it lets experts focus on more important things like what to do with all the algae. They’re using bioreactors to grow it on a large scale and trap it inside everyday products.
Professor Ralph says, “We can stick it into wall panels, we can stick it into carpet, we can stick it into all of these different structures that keep the atmospheric CO2 out of the atmosphere for decades.”
All the while sticking it to climate change to help cool our planet.
Scientists estimate we have 10 years left to eliminate carbon from all industries in order to meet the world’s climate targets and slow down global warming.