Norway starts work on carbon storage program — says it’s “absolutely necessary”
The country believes simply reducing our emissions isn't enough -- we'll also need to sequester carbon underground.

 by Mihai Andrei
July 23, 2021
in Environment, Future, News


Norway is investing 1.7 billion euros into a full-scale carbon capture, transport, and storage project. The project named “Longship” is now under construction, and Norway is inviting other countries to join the project.

Image credits: Departments of Energy and Climate Change.
CCS


If we want to ensure a sustainable future without catastrophic climate damage, we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions — especially carbon dioxide. That can be done in several ways; one approach is to replace fossil fuel energy with renewable energy; another is to replace diesel cars with electric cars, or bicycles; changing our diets to less carbon-intensive foods can also make a big difference.

But there’s one area in which reducing emission has proven extremely difficult: factories — especially cement factories.

Cement alone represents around 8% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and, overall, 20% of global emissions come from heavy industries, which are typically factory-based). If cement facilities were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter behind only China and the US. This is where carbon capture and storage (CCS) would come into play.

“According to the UN Panel on Climate Change, the capture, transport and storage of CO₂ emissions from the combustion of fossil energy and industrial production is crucial in order to reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions,” the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy writes on the project’s page.

“For some industries, especially cement production and waste incineration, the capture and storage of CO₂ is the only way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

CCS is the process of capturing carbon dioxide and sequestering it underground. It works best when the CO₂ is captured from large point sources like (you’ve guessed it) factories. The technology could also be used to extract existing carbon from the atmosphere, but that technique is far less mature.

Image credits: Sask Power.

The aim is to prevent the release of carbon into the atmosphere and instead, inject it into geological formations where it would stay indefinitely.

The problem is that CCS is still expensive, and the technology is still emerging. Without a firm tax on carbon, the technology is pretty much a money sink. Besides, you also require the right geology to inject the carbon.

But Norway, a country that could become carbon-neutral as early as 2030, has the right suitable geological conditions, and is willing to invest money into a pioneering project, with the approval of the Norwegian Parliament. CCS is “absolutely necessary” if the world is to avoid runaway climate change, a state secretary told Dezeen.

“If we succeed in capturing and storing CO₂, it will be significantly cheaper to achieve the climate goals. Longship contributes in making this more feasible and less costly,” the project’s page writes. The carbon dioxide will be buried under the North Sea, into suitable bedrock. There is enough bedrock at the site to store Norway’s current emissions for a thousand years.

The government is also working with several companies. Northern Lights, the organization tasked with transporting the greenhouse gas and storing it under the sea, is already in discussion with several industrial partners. Reportedly, 60 companies are already interested in the project. The first carbon capture will happen at the Norcem cement factory in Brevik.

From Brevik, the CO₂ will be transported by ship to a new reception terminal in Øygarden in Hordaland. Then, the CO₂ will be sent through pipelines and permanently stored in a geological formation about 2,600 meters below the seabed. Northern Lights (a venture that involves Equinor, Shell, and Total) will realize the transport and storage of CO₂ in Longship. However, it's not clear how much such a service could cost.


This is an encouraging step, but in order for CCS to work, it requires international cooperation -- not just for the storage itself, but also for developing and commercializing new technology. Without CCS, reaching our emissions goals is exceedingly difficult -- but we're still just getting started.

According to the Global CCS Institute, in 2020, CCS operations had a capacity of about 40 million tons of CO2 per year, with another 50 million tons per year in development. In contrast, the world emits about 38 billion tonnes of CO2 every year.

NO MORE WHEAT BOARD

Contract squeeze worries farmers

By Freelance writer, Mary MacArthur
WESTERN PRODUCER
Published: July 23, 2021

Farmers across the Prairies face significant yield losses this year because of heat waves and lack of rain. Now they may not be able to fill earlier-signed production contracts. | Randy Vanderveen photo


CAMROSE, Alta — As heat and drought burn up crops across the Prairies, many farmers wonder if they will have enough crop to fill what they thought were modest production contracts.

“I worry about my barley because my barley is 70 percent priced and my canola is at 50 percent priced. A lot of farmers are panicking,” said Gilles Roy, a farmer at Falher, in Alberta’s Peace River region, which has had very little rain since seeding.

Strong feed barley prices before seeding enticed Roy to price much of his barley because good crops of barley are common .

But drought stopped the plants from growing and heat may have stopped the heads from filling. Inquiries into whether he could cancel or buy out his priced contract haven’t eased his concerns.

“I didn’t cancel out of any of mine. It is so expensive, the fee they want to charge you. It is up to $30 a tonne penalty they want to charge you. I will wait until I have it all in the bin and see how much I have.”

Then, Roy will begin negotiations on the missing bushels and any penalty.

“I want to know the terms before I haul one bushel.”

Bryan Woronuk of Rycroft said last year, grain companies were letting farmers out of their contracts with no penalty, just a promise to remember their good deed, but last year’s good will seems to have disappeared.

“I contracted what I thought was a conservative amount of grain and now wondering how it can be filled,” said Woronuk.

It’s a story heard across the Prairies, said grain marketer Derek Squair of Exceed Grain Marketing.

“I have customers who have average-sized crops and are not too concerned, but I have customers in poorer areas who maybe might get 25 percent of an average crop, which is quite devastating financially.

“Feed barley is one that keeps popping up because prices are quite good. We’ve never really seen that strong of prices for feed barley off the combine before. So, I think a lot of farmers will get caught. They maybe went a little further on feed barley because they were such good prices than they normally would and barley seems to be getting hit hard from drought,” said Squair, of Regina.

Not all grain companies are sympathetic to farmers who locked in tonnage and price and now can’t fill those contracts. Grain companies have already sold the grain, planned their sales and are now wondering if they will get grain for the price contracted.

“Some smaller, more nimble companies will let you roll contracts over to next year. They know they will get that volume sometime and they are comfortable with that. Other companies are just holding producers’ feet to the fire and asking for exorbitant buy-out clauses and will not give you a buy-out price,” said Squair.

For farmers who are unsure if they will have enough crop to fill their contract, good communication is key, said Derek Drey, regional manager for Saskatchewan North with FarmLink Marketing.

“The best thing to do is to start an open conversation. It is very difficult to exit out of most of these contracts. Whether you buy out or roll it over to the next crop year, there are different strategies you can work together with your buyer on.

“But unfortunately, it is not a simple phone call to cancel your contract or get even a cost to get out of the contract. That is why there is so much emotional pain right now when it comes to these contract buyouts,” said Drey, who farms west of Saskatoon.

Drey said last year he wasn’t able to fill his canola contract. As soon as he realized he wouldn’t have the required bushels he called the grain company. Luckily for Drey, the company allowed him to roll the contract over to the following year instead of paying out any penalty and money for the missing bushels.

“What that did for our farm is alleviate the cash flow pain of having to put physical funds out to buy out a contract. That was more of a favourable outcome,” he said.

“I have a lot of empathy for my farmer friends right now. It is one extra stress level on top of not having a crop.”

Delivery contracts and priced contracts aren’t just for farmers with a high risk tolerance.

Contracts have become the norm for farmers who want to deliver grain at harvest and receive money to pay bills in the fall, said Squair.

“The industry has gone to the point where you have to do some pre-pricing if you want money at harvest. The cash demand on a family farm is very high so you have to get in the queue. If you don’t pre-price, you are not going to be selling grain until December or January,” he said.

“In order to pay bills, you need to have some sort of forward pricing just to have a spot to deliver. The producers who are the most cash strapped would be on the higher end of that scale, more like 30 percent sold, and those are the farmers that are going to get beat up the most.

“Farmers don’t have much of an option. Good communication is the first option, but the grain company is saying they don’t want to talk to you right now. If they do talk to you they give such a high number to buy out at it is ridiculous.”

Squair worries inflexible positions by grain companies will permanently damage relations in the industry.

“Grain companies that work with producers this year, will negotiate with producers or defer some of the tonnage of payment will make out better in the long run because those customers will be very loyal to those companies that help them through a tough time.

“It is going to make every producer very gun shy to ever do a forward contract again and it is going to hurt the grain companies because they use these forward contracts to plan logistics and trains and vessels and make sure they have everything in place and the sales on the books to move grain in a timely manner,” said Squair.

Marlene Boersch of Mercantile Consulting Ventures said that during a recent producer meeting in Weyburn, discussions turned to the one-sided contracts by grain companies who shift all the risk to farms for everything from lack of grain to poor railway service.

“As a grower, I cannot influence how the rail contracts work out, how the railroad performs and it’s even worse when you talk about problems with ocean freight. You have no negotiating power. Elevator agents who used to have a little bit of leeway in how they serviced their customers, that is no longer the case. Usually head offices in Winnipeg or Calgary said these are the contracts; full stop.”

Farmers and industry associations need to develop a new contract template that is fair to grain companies and farmers, she said.

“The fact that you have no negotiation power from the farmer side of the contract and have a three-page list covering everything from railroad to God knows what, is no longer fair, in my view.”

Grower associations that take check-off money from farmers for pulse, oats, wheat, canola and barley all need to be advocating for contracts that are not tilted in favour of grain companies.

“They live off the farmers’ money. They charge a checkoff. In my mind, you represent the farmers and you must find a better way. You must represent the interests, but it doesn’t happen,” she said.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Roy. The once strong farmer voice has been fragmented into small commodity groups only advocating for their own crop and not with a unified voice for farmers.

“I think farmers are left as an individual entity. We don’t have much of a body to go to bat for us,” said Roy.

Jim Beusekom, president of Market Place Commodities, a Lethbridge grain company, said they have received calls from farmers wanting to cancel their contracts. Some farmers want to buy out of their contract in hopes of cashing in on higher prices than the original contract. Others simply don’t have the grain to fill their contract.

“How do you separate the two? For the most part we take their word for it that they don’t have the crop,” said Beusekom.

Letting a farmer out of a contract is not a simple switch. Beusekom bought the grain and has since sold the grain to his customers.

“I do think it is both our problems.”

Letting a farmer out of a contract doesn’t solve his problem of finding grain. If one farmer doesn’t have a crop, likely neither does his neighbour.

“The farmer has it sold and it’s our grain and we have it sold to someone else.

“Trust me, we are really all in it together.”

Beausekom said many farmers carry crop insurance that helps cover their lost crop and will pay the difference between the contracted price and the now higher price.

“They do have a number of risk management options. We don’t have crop insurance for our company.”

‘I can see the industry disappearing’: US fishermen sound alarm at plans for offshore wind

Fishermen say their concerns, from safety issues to how offshore wind will alter the ocean environment, aren’t being meaningfully considered by regulators

Offshore wind turbines near Block Island, Rhode Island. 

Photograph: Michael Dwyer/AP

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Maddie Stone
Sat 24 Jul 2021 

For the past nine years, Tom Dameron has managed government relations for Surfside Foods, a New Jersey-based shellfish company. If you asked him five years ago what his biggest challenge was at work, the lifelong fisherman would have said negotiating annual harvest quotas for surf and quahog clams.

Today, he’d tell you it is surviving the arrival of the offshore wind industry, which is slated to install hundreds of turbines atop prime fishing grounds over the next decade.

While there isn’t a single wind turbine spinning off the coast of the Garden state yet, plans are under way for new offshore wind developments that hope to power more than a million homes with carbon-free energy over the next several years.

The wind farms are expected to create thousands of new jobs, but the price tag looks steep to Dameron, who fears those jobs and climate benefits will come at the expense of his industry. If wind lease areas are fully developed across the mid-Atlantic, Dameron said clam fishermen will lose access to highly productive areas of the ocean, which could send the multimillion-dollar industry into a “downward spiral”.

“I could see the clam industry in Atlantic City disappearing,” Dameron said.
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Dameron’s fears are being echoed by fishermen across the country as they face the arrival of a big new energy business in waters many have fished for generations.

Offshore wind, which has long struggled to take off in the US due to high costs, regulatory uncertainty and fierce resistance from shoreside residents, is now surging forward under the Biden administration. In March, Joe Biden committed to building 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, enough to power 10m homes and avoid 78m metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

With strong political pressure to accelerate offshore wind development as part of the administration’s larger effort to tackle the climate crisis, fishermen feel they are being forgotten. Many say that their concerns – which range from safety issues operating around wind farms to how offshore wind development will alter the ocean environment and affect fish stocks – aren’t being meaningfully considered by regulators.

Offshore wind “is one of the most consistently cited factors as a big risk to businesses and their practices”, said Annie Hawkins, the executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (Roda), a trade association representing commercial fishermen. “It is a huge, huge thing in the minds of fishermen right now.”

While the European offshore wind industry has grown rapidly in recent years, with more than 5,000 turbines generating a combined 25 gigawatts of renewable power capacity as of earlier this year, America has lagged behind. Today, the entire US offshore wind fleet consists of five turbines in state waters off Rhode Island and two research turbines in federal waters off Virginia.

Over the coming decades, the US is expected to catch up by installing thousands of additional turbines in lease areas spanning thousands of square miles of ocean. American fishermen are bracing for the sorts of spatial conflicts that have arisen in Europe, where fishermen are often legally forbidden to operate in the vicinity of wind farms and subsea cables, or have stopped operating in their vicinity by choice due to safety and liability concerns.

In the north-eastern US and mid-Atlantic, where America’s first commercial wind farms will be built, lease areas overlap with highly productive fisheries that add billions of dollars to regional economies. While the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) hasn’t declared any of these wind energy areas off-limits for fishing, as in Europe fishermen worry that turbines and their associated infrastructure, including seafloor transmission cables and concrete foundations, will make it impossible to operate their vessels safely.

“What essentially this is turning into is thousands of miles of closed areas,” said Meghan Lapp, the general manager at Seafreeze Shoreside, a Rhode Island-based fish plant

The beach coastline of Ocean City, New Jersey. A large offshore wind energy project planned off the coast of New Jersey would run cables from the wind farm to potential locations including Ocean City. Photograph: Ted Shaffrey/AP

Along the US west coast, where floating offshore wind technology is expected to be deployed because of the much greater depth to seafloor, suspended transmission cables could impede fishing nets and create a “functional closure” for certain types of gear, said Mike Conroy, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA).

If fishing gear does become entangled with offshore wind equipment “that is an extremely dangerous situation in terms of sinking a boat or loss of life”, said Daphne Munroe, a shellfish ecologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Wind turbines can also interfere with the radar systems fishermen use to navigate.

Fishermen have additional concerns about how commercial-scale offshore wind development will affect fish stocks and the ocean environment. Noise from the construction and operation of wind turbines could potentially drive fish away, while undersea foundations risk becoming artificial reefs that alter the distribution of species in wind lease areas. Wind turbines may also alter ocean currents in a way that affects the mid-Atlantic “cold pool”, a vast area of cold water near the seafloor that allows numerous species, including scallops, clams and flounder, to thrive.

The large-scale, long-term environmental impacts of offshore wind have not been well researched in US waters, and the types of studies needed to address these questions are expensive, said Aran Mooney, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

“There is an OK amount of research funding going into this, but there certainly needs to be more to get at these bigger questions,” Mooney said.

To reach the Biden administration’s goal of expanding offshore wind development, BOEM is moving quickly to review and approve offshore wind farms in federal waters, identify new ocean areas for wind energy development, and hold lease sales. By 2025, the agency aims to have completed an environmental review of at least 16 offshore wind farm construction and operations plans.

The pace of offshore wind development is “going fast relative to the scale of research on these topics”, said Travis Miles, an oceanographer at Rutgers University who is exploring the potential impacts of offshore wind on the mid-Atlantic cold pool. “And it would be really unfortunate to leave our fishing industry behind”

BOEM marine biologist Brian Hooker said in an email that since 2009, the agency had awarded “millions of dollars” for fisheries-related research in the Atlantic on topics ranging from how fish migrate through lease areas to how they are affected by artificial sounds and electromagnetic fields. In its fiscal year 2022-2023 research plan, BOEM proposed a new study to investigate the spatial needs of the commercial clam industry in the New York Bight, a heavily fished area between New Jersey and Long Island where the agency will be holding an offshore wind lease sale this year.

The agency’s proposed sale notice for the New York Bight, released in June, also contains several provisions aimed at helping fishermen. These include a proposal for 2.5-mile-wide fishing vessel transit lanes in the proposed Hudson South lease area and a requirement that wind developers coordinate with the fishing industry and consider any “potential conflicts” when developing construction and operation plans.

Some offshore wind developers are attempting to address fishing industry concerns. Drawing on its experience working with the commercial fishing industry overseas, developer Equinor held a series of meetings with fishermen as it was planning Empire Wind, a proposed offshore wind farm south of Long Island. Based on feedback it received during those meetings, Equinor redesigned the layout for the wind farm to include an open area for fishing at the western edge of the lease area.

“Equinor met us halfway and negotiated something that would work well for everybody,” said Hawkins, who co-organized the meetings and attended them on behalf of Roda.

In recent years in Europe, many spatial conflicts have been avoided by this sort of collaborative planning. But right now, Hawkins said that meaningful negotiations between offshore wind developers and fishermen in US waters the exception rather than the norm. “From our perspective we’ve seen less authentic engagement with fishermen” since the start of the Biden administration, Hawkins said. “It certainly has the appearance of [developers] thinking they’re going to be all right no matter what.”

Hooker said that BOEM will “continue to engage with commercial fishermen to avoid or reduce potential impacts from offshore wind energy development.” BOEM, he said, works with the US coast guard and others at all stages of offshore wind development to determine how navigation and fishing will be impacted, and the agency tries to avoid leasing the most heavily trafficked parts of the ocean.

But according to Hawkins: “The fishing industry feels very strongly that they still do not have a meaningful voice in the process nor an authentic seat at the table.”

Top US scientist on melting glaciers: ‘I’ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner’

Diana Six, an entomologist studying beetles near Glacier national park in Montana, says the crisis has fundamentally changed her profession

Clouds and rain are seen on Lake McDonald as Glacier national park opens to visitors in June 2020. Photograph: Kent Meireis/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

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About this content

Jyoti Madhusoodanan
Wed 21 Jul 2021 09.00 BST

Diana Six’s love of the outdoors began before she could form words, run, or collect the bugs and fungi that were precious to her as a child. A tough home life eventually led her to drop out of school and live on the streets. But biology classes in community college helped Six discover her calling in studying various forms of life. “They took me right back to how I was as a kid,” she says.


Activists fear Biden’s climate pledges are falling apart: ‘We aren’t seeing grit’

Now an entomologist at the University of Montana, she has spent the last 30 years researching how bark beetles are decimating pine forests. But a constant, haunting depression has taken over her life. A recent trip to Glacier national park spurred her to vent some of this emotion in a tweet that went viral and resonated with many: “Glacier National Park. 97F in June. Little snow left. 75F degree water. Glaciers disappearing. That is what we hear. But the worst is what most never see.”

To Six, the climate crisis isn’t just decimating glaciers and life on Earth. It’s taking her identity with it. She recently spoke to the Guardian about her changing role on the land she loves.

“Idon’t think people realize that climate change is not just a loss of ice. It’s all the stuff that’s dependent on it. The ice is really just the canary in the coalmine. To have 97, 98 degrees in Glacier national park for days on end is insane. This is not just some fluke.

“There are many years where the snow is gone so early that you just don’t see it in the mountains. And water getting that warm is absolutely devastating to fish and algae.

“Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked.

“There have been total losses of a lot of baby birds this year. You see these ospreys and eagles sitting on top of the trees in their nests and those young, they just can’t take the heat. Year after year of that and you lose your birds.
People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not

“People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated, they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.

“I’m also an artist. I recently finished a 10-week art course called Identity in America where the instructor made us use a medium we had not worked with before, because he felt we couldn’t go back to old habits. I ended up drawing myself morphing from being an ecologist to the guys who walked around during the plague to bring out the bodies.
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“When I was forced to actually confront my identity, I realized that I’m no longer doing what I thought I was. My whole life has been documenting how life works, how we can conserve species that are in trouble. I was no longer cataloging life and finding ways to prevent ecosystems from reaching tipping points. I had actually hit my own tipping point. Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death. And that is what is accounting for my kind of overwhelming sense of grief.

“This is what really brought home to me that my entire job has changed. I don’t like my new job, but I can’t quit. Even if I quit being a professor and doing research, I’m always going to be a coroner now.

“When I started work, I didn’t think about climate change. It was far enough back that people were still kind of wondering, is it really happening? Then pretty early in my career as a professor, I realized I had to incorporate climate change into most of what I was doing. These tree-killing bark beetles I study have always had outbreaks. It’s not anything new. But when mountain pine beetle developed this most recent outbreak, it was so far out of the norm in size and severity, we couldn’t ignore that.

“I would walk through these forests and almost everything was dead. When you see a beetle kill 70 million hectares of trees across North America, you just have to change your research questions. My focus had to shift from the beetles to how we can help our forests survive this. You have to come at these systems from a completely different direction now.

“We’re coming at things all wrong, trying to save a species by putting it in a zoo or replanting trees. But if you aren’t going to the root cause of the problem it’s still going to happen. That’s not to say that if we didn’t just get our act together and make some major changes, we couldn’t save some of this. We just can’t do it one species at a time.”

This article was amended on 22 July 2021. An earlier version referenced a beetle species killing “70 acres” of trees across North America; this should have been 70 million hectares.

Capturing carbon: West Carleton high school grad hopes to use seawater to slow climate crisis

“What’s special about this project is that it takes CO2 out of the ocean, as well as the atmosphere.”

Author of the article: Rachel Morgan • Capital Current

Publishing date:Jul 23, 2021 • 

Devinder Sarai is a West Carleton grad who is off to Harvard this fall. PHOTO BY ERROL MCGIHON /Postmedia

Big changes need big ideas and these can come from anywhere — even the lush farmland of West Carleton.

Devinder Sarai is working on one such big idea: his goal is to combat the climate crisis that is threatening our planet.

Sarai’s big idea is called Cequest. In essence, the recent graduate from West Carleton Secondary School wants to build a technology that uses seawater to capture carbon dioxide from the air and ocean; turn it into a mineralized bicarbonate; and sink it back into the oceans where it will be sequestered.

The process has the added benefit of adding alkalinity to the oceans to balance out the acidity that poses a risk to our blue planet. Sarai’s even got a fundraising campaign underway to raise enough money to compete for Elon Musk foundation’s XPrize for Carbon Renewal.

“We’re taking CO2 out of the atmosphere,” he told Capital Current. “What’s special about this project is that it takes CO2 out of the ocean, as well as the atmosphere.”

Sarai, who graduated high school in 2020, is building a prototype of his “carbon sequestration factory.” When operational, he says, one factory could remove 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and ocean a year. That could take care of Canada’s annual contribution to global warming.

According to an assessment by the federal government, Canada alone put 730 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in 2019. And Canada contributes about 1.5 per cent of global emissions.

Sarai is a lover of nature and that led to his interest in the environment.

“It’s beautiful in the morning, pristine. Everything’s really nice,” he said. “But, at the same time, to think that on the other side of the country, and especially in the United States, there are wildfires going on. It’s like hurricane season now. And those are getting worse and worse every year. And flooding around the world, all that is happening while I’m still able to enjoy (the outdoors). I try and put myself in that perspective.”

Sarai’s passion for the environment and his participation in a hackathon set up by The Knowledge Society in Ottawa in April led him to the carbon sequestration project. For the hackathon, Sarai’s team focused on reducing carbon emissions by 10 times. The team got a lot of positive feedback for their work in the hackathon, but he was the only one who wanted to take the idea further.

“I have all the parts set up,” Sarai said. “I have several mentors advising in the field, like sciences, business, and then also in terms of just building things that have never really been built before.”

Sarai is working closely with Richard DeVaul, an innovation consultant who has worked with Apple and Google X, Andrew Blanchard, partner at the investment firm Jacket River, and Ottawa-based Ian Lockhart, a senior director of The Knowledge Society.

Sarai’s prototype will compete for a chunk of the $100 million XPrize pot, the largest such incentive in history. The XPrize for Carbon Renewal is a four-year global competition encouraging student teams, small companies and individuals to find ways to sequester carbon directly from the atmosphere or oceans. XPrize will award up to $5 million U.S. to student teams in the fall of 2021.

“That would go a long way towards actually developing a factory,” Sarai said. “But the second thing, I think … would be the credibility that it gives.”

Even if he doesn’t win the XPrize, a bright future lies ahead for Sarai, who is off to Harvard University in the fall to study computer science. He took a year off school after the pandemic put his scholarship on hold. He said he is looking forward to the people he will meet at Harvard and to be able to push himself past his perceived boundaries.

“It’s such a high concentration of bright minds. You’re surrounded by world-class people,” he said. “Who knows what that network will bring. And just cool conversations. Really cool, inspiring people that will just get you to level up as well.”

As for Cequest, Sarai says he has plans to continue developing his carbon sequestration project.

“Building it out, working with a great team across the world because it’s also a business,” he said. “It’s economically incentivized.”

This story also appears in Capital Current, the community news site run by Carleton University’s journalism program.

Space
Inside the simple computer program that could explain why the Universe exists at all



Inside the simple computer program that could explain why the Universe exists at all

Stephen Wolfram is trying to find a rule that dictates the Universe. And in doing so, he might even become the first person to finally devise a complete, fundamental theory of physics. Elegant, or what?


By Marcus Chown

Published: 23rd July, 2021 

Back in the plague year of 1665-1666, Isaac Newton changed the scientific world, discovering the universal law of gravity and the mathematics of calculus. Now, in the plague year of 2020-2021, is history about to repeat itself?

Stephen Wolfram thinks so. The British-born scientist, who lives in the US, claims he has found a route to a fundamental theory of physics that answers some of the biggest questions, such as what is space? What is time? And why does the Universe exist?

“To be fair, a lot of the work was done in 2019 and we were about to start speaking about it in March 2020, but everything locked down for COVID,” says Wolfram. “But it is true to say that we have made more progress towards finding a fundamental theory of physics than I dared believe was possible.”

Wolfram’s starting point was to ask: What is space? “Physicists don’t often ask this question,” he says. “They merely think of space as the backdrop against which the events of the Universe play out.”

According to Wolfram, space is made of a network of ‘nodes’, which are connected to each other. The nature of the connections – how each node is linked to nearby and faraway nodes – can create a space of any dimension. So if the number of nodes increases as the square of the distance from any given node – like the surface area of a sphere – the network has the properties of familiar 3D space.

“I actually believe the Universe started out with infinitely many dimensions and gradually cooled down to the three we have today,” says Wolfram. “But I don’t yet know why there are precisely three.”

Wolfram is interested in what is the minimal ‘stuff’ needed to create the Universe. And in addition to the network of nodes – ‘the atoms of space’ – there is another ingredient, the ‘rules’ that change the network. So, for instance, a rule will say: ‘wherever there is a particular pattern of nodes, replace it with another particular pattern of nodes’.

“It is the application of such rules, over and over again – the continual updating of the space network – that knits together space,” says Wolfram. “The miracle is that this process can also create all the matter in the Universe and all laws of physics we have discovered over the past 350 years.”

Stephen Wolfram © Wolfram Research Inc/Tom Straw

Before examining this remarkable claim, it is worth considering how Wolfram got to this point. Born in London in 1959, he was publishing physics papers at the age of 15. As a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he worked with Richard Feynman, arguably the most notable post-war US physicist. But a crucial event for Wolfram was a discovery he made in 1981 when he used a computer to investigate the consequences of simple computer programs – ones whose output is repeatedly fed back in as their input, like a snake eating its own tail.

The simplest computer programs he could think of at the time were cellular automata. These are one-dimensional lines of squares, each of which can be empty or filled. A rule is applied that replaces a certain pattern of squares with another. In this way, a new line of squares is created. And another new line. And so on.

Most of the time Wolfram found that nothing interesting happened. In some cases, however, there were persistent features that moved across the evolving cellular grid, reminiscent of subatomic particles in the real world. But the big surprise was that there were a few rules that created never-ending novelty and complexity.

This was a light bulb moment for Wolfram. Usually, simple programs have simple outputs and complex programs have complex outputs. But Wolfram had discovered simple programs with complex outputs. His immediate thought was, “Is this how the Universe creates a rose or a newborn baby or a galaxy? Is it merely applying a simple program over and over again?”

In 2002, Wolfram published A New Kind Of Science, a 1,200-page tome with 1,000 black-and-white pictures and half a million words. In it, among other things, he explored the consequences of all 256 possible rules for one-dimensional cellular automata, among which was Rule 30, which generated unlimited complexity. The book was met with hostility from the physics community. Partly, it was because he had published it himself without going through the usual peer review process. But another reason was that other physicists could not see how to use his ideas to predict anything useful.

They had a point. Basically, Wolfram was saying that most of what the Universe is doing is ‘computationally irreducible’ – that is, the outcome can be discovered only by running the computer program for the 13.82 billion years the Universe has been in existence. To many other physicists that was a fat lot of good.

But Wolfram was also saying that, within the Universe-generating computation, there are ‘computationally reducible’ islands, where it is possible to deduce the outcome without actually running the program. “These shortcuts are none other than the laws of physics we have discovered,” says Wolfram.

In the end, Wolfram did not pursue the ideas he had laid out in A New Kind Of Science. On the one hand, he says, there was no demand from physicists. And on the other hand, there was demand for his software such as the computer language Mathematica and the intelligent search engine WolframAlpha, which had made him a billionaire. He therefore spent the next two decades developing them instead.

But in 2019, he met some young physicists who encouraged him to continue his search for a fundamental, computational theory of physics. And, at the age of 60, it was now or never.

From order there was chaos: Wolfram’s Rule 30 found that even a simple rule that determines the colour of cells in a row can generate complexity © Richard Ling/Wikipedia

The problem with cellular automata is that they run on a pre-existing grid. Wolfram realised quickly that he needed something simpler, even more basic. This is how he hit on the idea of a self-updating space network. There are persistent features in the networks, rather like vortices in water, and these are matter. Ultimately, then, everything arises from space. There is nothing else. Actually, that is not entirely true. There is one other thing. “Time, which everyone since Einstein has thought is the same as space, isn’t,” says Wolfram. “Time is actually the process of step-by-step computation.”

One of the problems with Wolfram’s earlier approach was that, if he found the program that is generating the Universe – and he believed it might be no longer than four lines of code in his own computer language, Mathematica – the question would then arise, why this program and not another? Wolfram therefore hit on the idea that the Universe is being generated by
all possible programs running simultaneously.

“At first sight it seems unbelievably messy. How can anything useful come out of this?” he says. “But the miracle is that everything does, including the twin pillars of modern physics: Einstein’s theory of gravity [General Relativity] and quantum theory.”

The key thing is to realise that we are not observing the Universe from outside. That is impossible. Instead, we are pieces of self-updating space network within the overall self-updating space network of the Universe. Not only are we limited in the amount of computation we can do and so unable to perceive most of the irreducible computation going on all around us but we are also limited by our biology, which causes us to impose a single thread of time on what we see. “Despite the fact that all possible rules are actually operating, our sampling will reveal a single rule generating the Universe,” says Wolfram.

Crucially, our fundamental limitations do not permit us to see the atoms of space. Instead, we see them linked together to make a smooth continuum – a continuum, furthermore, that is described by General Relativity. In Einstein’s theory, masses like planets follow the shortest path, or ‘geodesic’, through space-time. Space-time is in turn warped by the presence of energy (strictly speaking, energy-momentum). According to Wolfram, energy in his picture is nothing more than the amount of activity going on at any location in the network, and it is this computation that ultimately bends the geodesics of massive bodies.

Quantum theory, in contrast, describes the microscopic realm of atoms and their constituents, and is notorious for appearing fundamentally incompatible with General Relativity. Specifically, there is no such thing as a unique path through space. Atoms can follow multiple paths, each with an associated probability. According to Wolfram, this multiple history is built into his framework because, each time a piece of space network is updated, it can be updated by not just one rule but multiple possible rules, leading to multiple histories. “Quantum theory is not a bolt-on, as in standard physics,” he says.

Wolfram goes further. He imagines a ‘branchial space’ that encapsulates all these multiple histories. And this requires the tools of Mathematica to visualise, which is one reason why other physicists, not just mere mortals, find it hard to follow Wolfram. However, the key thing Wolfram claims is that General Relativity, with its geodesics bent by energy-momentum in normal space, is exactly the same as quantum theory with its geodesics bent by energy-momentum in branchial space. “General Relativity and quantum theory are basically the same theory!” he says. “I never expected to discover such a lovely result.”

This is indeed an astonishing result. In mainstream physics, only string theory provides a framework that unites General Relativity and quantum theory, and it has big problems, not least the fact that it leads not to a single Universe but to a multiverse of about 10,500 universes. There is a strong hint, however, known as the ‘holographic principle’, that quantum theory and General Relativity are intimately connected and that quantum theory manifests itself as General Relativity in a higher dimensional space. Wolfram sees his work as confirming this connection.

Carlo Rovelli at Aix-Marseilles University works on ‘loop quantum gravity’, a rival of string theory, which attempts to show that space-time, down at the impossibly small Planck scale, is made of finite loops woven together into a complex shifting network. Is there any connection between Wolfram’s work and loop quantum gravity? “Indeed, I have been curious about the same question!” says Rovelli.

Others find Wolfram’s work fascinating. One is Gregory Chaitin, the Argentinian-American who invented a field of mathematics – algorithmic information theory – when he was 15. “I personally think his new work is very interesting,” he says. “And, yes, something like General Relativity and like quantum mechanics emerges rather naturally.”

Chaitin likes the originality of Wolfram’s approach. “What is fun is that this is completely orthogonal [distinct] to what everyone else is doing. Up to now, string theory has been the only game in town that attempts to operate at this level. Now there is another game.”

Artist’s impression of the Universe, with galaxy clusters concentrated at ‘nodes’ 

© Science Photo Library

Wolfram is encouraged by the response to his latest work, which is very different to the response he experienced in 2002. He says lots of the young physicists are attending his seminars, and older physicists are sending their students. He is live-streaming a lot of the development on the web so people can see what he is doing. “I have been surprised at how few people have said this can’t possibly work,” says Wolfram. “It’s been more like ‘I can’t understand this’ or ‘tell us what phenomena we can look for’.”

Wolfram is also not alone, as he was in 2002. He now has a handful of other physicists working with him. Chaitin thinks this is significant. “Unusually for Stephen, he even gives co-author credit to some,” he says. But one of the major differences between now and 2002 is the idea that information-processing is at the heart of the Universe is far more mainstream than it was two decades ago. In a way, nothing Wolfram is doing is contradicting accepted physics. He is merely attempting to go beneath the bonnet of the car to reveal the computation that both generates the Universe and the laws of physics that we observe.

One consequence of Wolfram’s picture is that aliens with different biologies and different senses may see different parts of the Universe-generating computation and therefore deduce different laws from quantum theory and General Relativity. In fact, they may forever be invisible to us, existing in parts of the space network our senses are simply not sampling. “Our view is limited by our size of about a metre in height and our insistence on seeing a single thread of time,” says Wolfram. “But creatures the size of the planet and without this insistence would see something entirely different.”

In the end, it will be predictions of new phenomena that will confirm or refute Wolfram’s computational universe. And at the moment these are lacking. However, Wolfram sees places that may be fruitful in yielding observational predictions. For instance, he believes there could be domains of our Universe with different numbers of dimensions. And, in particular, he suspects the black holes may be able to spin faster than permitted by standard physics and, in doing so, whole chunks of space-time may break off, something which is impossible in General Relativity.

The big question remains, why is there a Universe? And here Wolfram thinks the Universe may exist in the much the same sense that mathematics exists. Mathematics consists of a set of givens, or ‘axioms’, and the consequences, or ‘theorems’, that can be deduced from them by applying the rules of logic. Similarly, the Universe is merely the logical consequence of applying all possible rules to a network of disembodied nodes. “It is inevitable that it exists, in the same way it is inevitable that 1+1=2,” he says.

We, of course, experience the Universe as a solid thing, not an abstract thing like the edifice of mathematics. However, since we are also made of the same stuff as the Universe – like virtual creatures in a virtual reality – everything appears solidly real to us.

Whether or not Wolfram turns out to be the new Newton, the plague year has definitely played to Wolfram’s strengths. “I have always worked remotely from my company,” he says. “This last year has suited me.” He admits there is still a long way to go in getting a fundamental theory of physics. “But I am amazed how far things have progressed in a short time,” he says. “I never imagined it would work this well.”

This article first appeared in issue 365 of BBC Science Focus Magazine – f

About our expert, Stephen Wolfram
 is a computer scientist and physicist. He is the author of A New Kind of Science and created the programming software Mathematica and the computational knowledge engine WolframAlpha.


Authors
Marcus Chown
Social networks
Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brunel University. His books include The Ascent of Gravity, which was The Sunday Times Science Book of the Year; The Magicians; Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand, What A Wonderful World; Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You; Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil; and We Need to Talk to Kelvin and Afterglow of Creation, which were both runner-up for the Royal Society Book Prize.

Read more about the Universe:
The Universe’s 7 biggest mysteries (and why they’re unsolved)

The quest for quantum gravity: why being wrong is essential to science

The six numbers that define the entire Universe

The cracks in cosmology: Why our Universe doesn’t add up

What if the Big Bang was not the beginning?

Ghost stars: The radical theory that could solve the mystery of dark matter

New molten salt battery for grid-scale storage runs at low temp and cost
By Nick Lavars
July 21, 2021

A lab-scale prototype of a newly developed molten salt battery
Randy Montoya/Sandia National Laboratories

As renewable forms of power like wind and solar continue to gain prominence, there will be a need for creative solutions when it comes to storing energy from sources that are intermittent by nature. One potential solution is known as a molten salt battery, which offers advantages that lithium batteries do not, but have their share of kinks to iron out, too. Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have come up with a new design that addresses a number of these shortcomings, and demonstrated a working molten salt battery that can be constructed far more cheaply, while storing more energy, than currently available versions.

Storing vast amounts of energy in a cheap and efficient manner is the name of the game when it comes to powering whole cities with renewable energy, and despite its many strengths, this is where expensive lithium battery technology falls short. Molten salt batteries shape as a more cost-effective solution, which use electrodes kept in a molten state with the help of high temperatures. This is something that the Sandia scientists have been working to change.

"We've been working to bring the operating temperature of molten sodium batteries down as low as physically possible," says Leo Small, the lead researcher on the project. "There's a whole cascading cost savings that comes along with lowering the battery temperature. You can use less expensive materials. The batteries need less insulation and the wiring that connects all the batteries can be a lot thinner."

In their commercial form, these batteries are known as sodium-sulfur batteries, and a few of these have been developed around the world but generally operate at 520 to 660 °F (270 to 350 °C). The Sandia team have set their sights much lower, although doing so required a rethink as the chemistries that work at high temperatures don't lend themselves well to lower temperatures.


The scientists' design consists of liquid sodium metal that sits on the opposite side of a ceramic separator material to a novel liquid mixture made of sodium iodide and gallium chloride, which the scientists call a catholyte. When the battery discharges energy, chemical reactions take place that produces sodium ions and electrons that pass through the highly-selective separator material and produce molten iodide salt on the other side.

Sandia Labs scientists work on a new molten salt battery
Randy Montoya/Sandia National Laboratories

This sodium-sulfur battery proved capable of operating at just 230 °F (110 °C), and proved its worth across eight months of testing in the lab through which it was charged and discharged more than 400 times. Further, it runs at 3.6 volts, which the scientists say is around 40 percent higher than commercially available molten salt batteries. This could equate to versions with fewer cells and therefore a higher energy density.

"We were really excited about how much energy we could potentially cram into the system because of the new catholyte we're reporting in this paper," says study author Martha Gross. "Molten sodium batteries have existed for decades, and they're all over the globe, but no one ever talks about them. So, being able to lower the temperature and come back with some numbers and say, 'this is a really, really viable system' is pretty neat."

The scientists are now turning their attention to lowering the cost of the battery, which could come from replacing the gallium chloride which is around 100 times more expensive than table salt. They say the technology is still five to 10 years away from commercialization, but working in their favor is the safety of the battery, which poses no risk of fire.

"This is the first demonstration of long-term, stable cycling of a low-temperature molten-sodium battery," says study author Erik Spoerke. "The magic of what we've put together is that we've identified salt chemistry and electrochemistry that allow us to operate effectively at 230 °F. This low-temperature sodium-iodide configuration is sort of a reinvention of what it means to have a molten sodium battery."

The research was published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

Source: Sandia Labs via EurekAlert

SuperBIT: A low-cost, balloon-borne telescope to rival Hubble

by Royal Astronomical Society

SuperBIT's final preparations for launch from Timmins Stratospheric Balloon Base Canada, in September 2019. Credit: Steven Benton, Princeton University

Durham, Toronto and Princeton Universities have teamed up with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to build a new kind of astronomical telescope. SuperBIT flies above 99.5% of the Earth's atmosphere, carried by a helium balloon the size of a football stadium. The telescope will make its operational debut next April and when deployed should obtain high-resolution images rivaling those of the Hubble Space Telescope. Mohamed Shaaban, a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto, will describe SuperBIT in his talk today (Wednesday 21 July) at the online RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2021).

Light from a distant galaxy can travel for billions of years to reach our telescopes. In the final fraction of a second, the light has to pass through the Earth's swirling, turbulent atmosphere. Our view of the universe becomes blurred. Observatories on the ground are built at high altitude sites to overcome some of this, but until now only placing a telescope in space escapes the effect of the atmosphere.

The Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (or SuperBIT) has a 0.5 meter diameter mirror and is carried to 40km altitude by a helium balloon with a volume of 532,000 cubic meters, about the size of a football stadium.

Its final test flight in 2019 demonstrated extraordinary pointing stability, with variation of less than one thirty-six thousandth of a degree for more than an hour. This should enable a telescope to obtain images as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Nobody has done this before, not only because it is exceedingly difficult, but also because balloons could stay aloft for only a few nights: too short for an ambitious experiment. However, NASA recently developed 'superpressure' balloons able to contain helium for months. SuperBIT is scheduled to launch on the next long duration balloon, from Wanaka, New Zealand, in April. Carried by seasonally stable winds, it will circumnavigate the Earth several times—imaging the sky all night, then using solar panels to recharge its batteries during the day.

A SuperBIT optical and ultraviolet composite image of the 'Pillars of Creation', trunks of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light years away in the direction of the constellation of Serpens. Credit: SuperBIT team, from Romualdez et al. (2018) SPIE 10702.

With a budget for construction and operation for the first telescope of US$5 million (£3.62 million), SuperBIT cost almost 1000 times less than a similar satellite. Not only are balloons cheaper than rocket fuel, but the ability to return the payload to Earth and relaunch it means that its design has been tweaked and improved over several test flights. Satellites must work first time, so typically have (phenomenally expensive) redundancy, and decade-old technology that had to be space-qualified by the previous mission. Modern digital cameras improve every year—so the development team bought the cutting-edge camera for SuperBIT's latest test flight a few weeks before launch. This space telescope will continue to be upgradable, or have new instruments on every future flight.

In the longer term, the Hubble Space Telescope will not be repaired again when it inevitably fails. For 20 years after that, ESA/NASA missions will enable imaging only at infrared wavelengths (like the James Webb Space Telescope due to launch this autumn), or a single optical band (like the Euclid observatory due to launch next year).

By then SuperBIT will be the only facility in the world capable of high-resolution multicolour optical and ultraviolet observations. The team already has funding to design an upgrade from SuperBIT's 0.5 meter aperture telescope to 1.5 meters (the maximum carrying capacity of the balloon is a telescope with a mirror about 2 meters across). Boosting light gathering power tenfold, combined with its wider angle lens and more megapixels, will make this larger instrument even better than Hubble. The cheap cost even makes it possible to have a fleet of space telescopes offering time to astronomers around the world.

"New balloon technology makes visiting space cheap, easy, and environmentally friendly," said Shaaban. "SuperBIT can be continually reconfigured and upgraded, but its first mission will watch the largest particle accelerators in the Universe: collisions between clusters of galaxies."

The SuperBIT balloon in flight, above NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, Texas, in June 2016. Credit: Richard Massey / Durham University.

The science goal for the 2022 flight is to measure the properties of dark matter particles. Although dark matter is invisible, astronomers map the way it bends rays of light, a technique known as gravitational lensing. SuperBIT will test whether dark matter slows down during collisions. No particle colliders on Earth can accelerate dark matter, but this is a key signature predicted by theories that might explain recent observations of weirdly behaving muons.

"Cavemen could smash rocks together, to see what they're made of," added Prof. Richard Massey of Durham University. "SuperBIT is looking for the crunch of dark matter. It's the same experiment, you just need a space telescope to see it."

Hubble Space Telescope fixed after month of no science

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More information: Details about SuperBIT: sites.physics.utoronto.ca/bit

Provided by Royal Astronomical Society 

Undersea Volcano Discovered Near Christmas Island That Looks Like the Eye of Sauron

TOPICS:OceanographyThe ConversationVolcano

By TIM O'HARA, MUSEUMS VICTORIA JULY 23, 2021

A 3D map of the caldera known as the 'Eye of Sauron'. (Image credit: 3D imagery courtesy of CSIRO/MNF, GSM)

Looking like the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, an ancient undersea volcano was slowly revealed by multibeam sonar 3,100 meters below our vessel, 280 kilometers southeast of Christmas Island. This was on day 12 of our voyage of exploration to Australia’s Indian Ocean Territories, aboard CSIRO’s dedicated ocean research vessel, the RV Investigator.

Previously unknown and unimagined, this volcano emerged from our screens as a giant oval-shaped depression called a caldera, 6.2km by 4.8km across. It is surrounded by a 300m-high rim (resembling Sauron’s eyelids), and has a 300 m high cone-shaped peak at its center (the “pupil”).

Sonar image of the ‘Eye of Sauron’ volcano and nearby seamounts on the sea bed south-west of Christmas Island. Credit: Phil Vandenbossche & Nelson Kuna/CSIRO

A caldera is formed when a volcano collapses. The molten magma at the base of the volcano shifts upwards, leaving empty chambers. The thin solid crust on the surface of the dome then collapses, creating a large crater-like structure. Often, a small new peak then begins to form in the center as the volcano continues spewing magma.

One well-known caldera is the one at Krakatoa in Indonesia, which exploded in 1883, killing tens of thousands of people and leaving only bits of the mountain rim visible above the waves. By 1927, a small volcano, Anak Krakatoa (“child of Krakatoa”), had grown in its center.

In contrast, we may not even be aware of volcanic eruptions when they happen deep under the ocean. One of the few tell-tale signs is the presence of rafts of light pumice stone floating on the sea surface after being blown out of a submarine volcano. Eventually, this pumice stone becomes waterlogged and sinks to the ocean floor.

Our volcanic “eye” was not alone. Further mapping to the south revealed a smaller sea mountain covered in numerous volcanic cones, and further still to the south was a larger, flat-topped seamount. Following our Lord of the Rings theme, we have nicknamed them Barad-dûr (“Dark Fortress”) and Ered Lithui (“Ash Mountains”), respectively.

The voyage of the RV Investigator around Christmas Island. Credit: Tim O’Hara/Museums Victoria

Although author J.R.R. Tolkein’s knowledge of mountain geology wasn’t perfect, our names are wonderfully appropriate given the jagged nature of the first and the pumice-covered surface of the second.

The Eye of Sauron, Barad-dûr, and Ered Lithui are part of the Karma cluster of seamounts that have been previously estimated by geologists to be more than 100 million years old, and which formed next to an ancient sea ridge from a time when Australia was situated much further south, near Antarctica. The flat summit of Ered Lithui was formed by wave erosion when the seamount protruded above the sea surface, before the heavy seamount slowly sank back down into the soft ocean seafloor. The summit of Ered Lithui is now 2.6km below sea level.

But here is the geological conundrum. Our caldera looks surprisingly fresh for a structure that should be more than 100 million years old. Ered Lithui has almost 100m of sand and mud layers draped over its summit, formed by sinking dead organisms over millions of years. This sedimentation rate would have partially smothered the caldera. Instead it is possible that volcanoes have continued to sprout or new ones formed long after the original foundation. Our restless Earth is never still.

The large deep-sea predatory seastar Zoroaster. Credit: Rob French/Museums Victoria

But life adapts to these geological changes, and Ered Lithui is now covered in seafloor animals. Brittle-stars, sea-stars, crabs, and worms burrow into or skate over the sandy surface. Erect black corals, fan-corals, sea-whips, sponges, and barnacles grow on exposed rocks. Gelatinous cusk-eels prowl around rock gullies and boulders. Batfish lie in wait for unsuspecting prey.

Small batfish patrol the seamount summits. Credit: Rob French/Museums Victoria

Our mission is to map the seafloor and survey sea life from these ancient and secluded seascapes. The Australian government recently announced plans to create two massive marine parks across the regions. Our expedition will supply scientific data that will help Parks Australia to manage these areas into the future.

Elasipod sea cucumbers feed on organic detritus on deep sandy seafloors. Credit: Rob French/Museums Victoria

Scientists from museums, universities, CSIRO and Bush Blitz around Australia are participating in the voyage. We are close to completing part one of our journey to the Christmas Island region. Part two of our journey to the Cocos (Keeling) Island region will be scheduled in the next year or so.

No doubt many animals that we find here will be new to science and our first records of their existence will be from this region. We expect many more surprising discoveries.

Written by Tim O’Hara, Senior Curator of Marine Invertebrates, Museums Victoria.

Originally published on The Conversation.