OPR Hawaii is working to remedy the dire collapse into poor health of its ocean pastures.
These pastures are where the majority of ocean life and fish reside, feed, and reproduce.
Due to the trillions of tonnes of CO2, emitted in all of the yesterday’s of humanities fossil fuel age, our ocean pastures have been losing their plant life, the phytoplankton, the bottom of the ocean food chain.
Like a pasture on land an ocean pasture is sustained by the growth of its ‘grass’ the plankton. The grass of a pasture on land fails when there is a drought of rain, when this happens there is little to sustain the herds of animals for whom that pasture is their life. In the ocean, the ‘grass’ grows in water so it never needs the rain to fall, but it needs what the land gives back to the ocean, vital mineral dust.
As our world’s atmosphere has seen 50% more CO2 spewed into it by the burning of fossil fuels this CO2, as a vital plant nutrient, results in more luxuriant grass growing on the pastures/grasslands of Asia. More grass is called ‘good ground cover’ as when the wind blows it prevents the topsoil from becoming dust in the wind.
More grass growing, means less dust blowing!
While slowing the loss of topsoil is good for pastures in Mongolia it is terrible news for the ocean pastures of the ocean surrounding Hawaii. That missing dust is now a 70 year long worsening drought of dustfall. The ocean pastures have been steadily losing their primary productivity. With that loss of pasture, all of ocean life has been in steady decline.
OPR builds on more than 40 years of intensive academic and institutional research on the sacred bond between land and sea. The sea gives up water that sustains life on earth, and the land, in like manner, gives up vital dust that sustains life in the oceans.
As the late great oceanographer John Martin, who NASA memorializes on his own memorial NASA page ‘On The Shoulders Of Giants’ reminds us the oceans can be restored to historic levels of health and abundance with a remarkably tiny amount of the right mineral dust, to nourish dying ocean pastures, that will repurpose billions of tonnes of ocean acidifying deadly CO2 into replenished ocean life.
OPR replenishes natural dust and we bring back the fish!