New food source discovered in case of “nuclear winter” of World War III

With war widening in the Middle East, conflict continuing in Ukraine and the threat of a clash between China and Taiwan, the world may not have been this close to the brink of nuclear war in generations, the Daily Mail writes: “Researchers have once again begun sounding the alarm about the risks of a nuclear winter: imagine the Earth hidden from the sun by as much as 165 million tons of soot, freezing 16 degrees Fahrenheit below the global average.”

An all-out nuclear war could cut crop yields around the world, cutting global calorie production by 90 percent, according to agricultural and atmospheric scientists.

But an international team of researchers has found a “salty, savory answer”: huge seaweed farms strung along the ocean’s surface using ropes and buoys could help save up to 1.2 billion lives.

The team estimates that with an average cultivation of 33.63 tons of dry kelp, or life-saving seaweed, could be grown annually—with just a relatively modest amount of ocean surface area and a reasonable budget.

“If you use more productive areas, you would need about 416,000 sq km of ocean, which is roughly the size of Colombia,” said the study’s lead author, environmental scientist Dr Florian Ulrich Jaen.

Dr. Yen, a leading data scientist at the Colorado-based Alliance to Help Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), collaborated on the project with Louisiana State University’s Department of Ocean and Coastal Sciences, a German astrophysicist, and scientists from Texas and the Philippines.

The economic cost of this emergency program, aimed at feeding billions of people during a harsh nuclear winter, will be less than past successful US programs, Dr Yen said. “In the paper we compare the scale to US aircraft production during World War II,” Dr Yen said.

“We estimate that the expansion will likely require fewer resources than it currently does and should therefore be feasible,” he added, “but it is still a work in progress.”

One factor that Dr Yen said was still controversial, although his team was still crunching the numbers, was what the actual price of seaweed might be in such a scenario.

Their study, published in the journal Earth’s Future, used ocean climate models of the dramatic changes that would occur in a true nuclear winter.

“When the ocean surface gets cold, the water becomes denser, so it sinks, stimulating vertical circulation,” study co-author Dr Cheryl Harrison told DailyMail.com.

The result would be a convection current that would bring nutrient-rich water from the ocean depths to the surface, effectively fertilizing the regions needed for this massive aquatic plant growing program.

“Technically, this is called ‘penetrative convection,'” explains Dr. Harrison, “and is the reverse convection that occurs on your stove when you cook pasta, where cold water sinks instead of warm water rising, resulting in vertical circulation.”

Dr Harrison, who leads ocean biophysical modeling at the Louisiana State University Laboratory, said the process was well documented during the winter months at high latitudes, but a nuclear winter would push the cycle closer to the equator. “During a nuclear winter, the water stays cold for many years, so it just keeps flowing, churning up the deep water and its nutrients,” she wrote in an email. “Because it’s dark and cold, those nutrients aren’t used up as quickly.” phytoplankton, algae that form the basis of the ocean food web.”

Healthier ocean greens such as seaweed, Dr. Harrison said, “thrive well in these conditions, making them an excellent alternative food source.”

However, people don’t need to imagine a future where they put salty, wet sea plants on their plates at every meal, these researchers stressed.

Because the iodine found in seaweed can be toxic to humans in such large quantities, kelp’s contribution to the food web is likely to be more indirect. They estimate that seaweed farms would replace only 15 percent of the food currently consumed by humans, but would mostly be repurposed to produce animal feed and biofuels.

Researchers believe this archipelago of algae farms the size of Colombia could provide up to 50 percent of current biofuel production and 10 percent of livestock and other essential animal feed.

Dr Harrison told Live Science the project could also be used as a humanitarian aid in the wake of more likely disruptions to the global food supply chain.

Everything from a massive asteroid impact or a giant volcanic eruption to a regional crop failure or localized drought can be offset by a similar seaweed farming program.

“Throughout history, major eruptions have caused regional and global famine,” Dr Harrison said. “What we need is a plan for how to feed ourselves in these scenarios of sudden reduction in sunlight.”