Freegrass, I would warn against too much frontloading of efficacy without solid science to quantify how well olivine changes ocean alkalinity. I know there are top notch biogeochemistry PhDs who know about
Greensand (olivine) and I have seen experimental methodology that can give us some numbers to work with for the chemistry side of the story. But answers for how biological systems might react take time and before you start you need to have good QA/QC on methodology. Biology is always messy.
Take acidification for example. I understand this particular subject fairly well.
I helped track down funding and played an important part in starting a group called C-CAN, Calif. Current Acidification Network. Our group had its first meetings in 2010 but the impetus for a collaboration between science and the aquaculture/ fishing industries were stock crashes at Pacific Northwest US oyster hatcheries in 2007-2008 .
So when we gathered one question centered around biological thresholds . The oyster farmers could help supply that number because they had tested water enough times while batches of oysters died in their tanks. So one species of oyster would start to crash if the saturation state of seawater dropped below 1.7 omega.
The next question was what instrumentation could ascertain pH or alkalinity at an accuracy that in real time would result in a number accurate enough to monitor seawater at the intake source for aquaculture operations. The accuracy of each of two parameters measured separately needed to be very good because uncertainty increases when two sets of uncertainty are added together. So from the expertise in the room we could determine the accuracy of existing technology wasn’t good enough to provide a real time numbers so oyster growers would know when the seawater of their intake pipes would kill their baby oysters. Those instruments exist now but they didn’t in 2010.
This is an example of biological thresholds and QA/QC in methodology to test seawater to get reliable results. Each different species has a different threshold of sensitivity and testing in a lab setting, or an aquaculture setting isn’t the same as instrumentation for open ocean autonomous sensors.
I am trying to stress the importance of proper design for biological testing of various species that exist in open water settings. When you add in potential effects of metal dissolution in whatever olivine you source you have some very difficult and expensive testing protocols to design . We don’t have any instrumentation that is both cheap, accurate and durable. Sensors need calibration, and biological fouling can distort your results. So instruments need babysitting and experimental design can only
answer specific questions. Think time and money.
So as much as we might want solutions we need to acknowledge the difficulty in how we get answers to very difficult questions.
