For a Greener Future we must look at our past
hi
my name is dr alex thompson and i’m a
marine biogeochemist
and ecologist i also work with startups
and small businesses to make their
industries a little bit more sustainable
by helping them to develop new tools and
resources
to green up what they’re working on now
explaining to someone what a marine
biogeochemist and ecologist does can
sometimes be a little bit confusing
i don’t swim with dolphins i don’t swim
with whales and although i love to track
turtles
it’s just not something that we do
instead we look at how our global
systems respond to change and how things
in the mud
and in our trees and our plants are able
to capture different things like carbon
and release things like gases
trying to help people understand how
their interactions can affect
these different systems is sometimes
also a little bit confusing
so i’m going to invite you to close your
eyes and just imagine something
imagine that you’re at a barbecue the
sun’s out
the barbecue’s sizzling someone’s made a
pavlova
everything’s great you hear the magic
world’s called
food’s ready so you line up by the
barbecue all excited to get your sausage
sandwich
vegan or meat whatever it is that you
choose you get handed a plastic plate
you get given some bread you get a
sausage you sit in the sun
and life is good after about 20 to 120
seconds depending on how fast you eat
your sausage sandwich
you take your plastic plate and you pop
it in the bin not much thought is put to
that process other than
man that sausage was great however what
we’re not considering
is that for you to eat that sausage
sandwich off that plastic plate
has literally taken billions of years of
evolutionary processes
to create the components that are
essential for that plastic inside that
plate
now you might be thinking that sounds a
bit extreme billions of years for a
plastic plate
well let me just kind of talk that
through for you so
our planet was formed about 4.54 billion
years ago
and for a good portion of those initial
years it was a big
hot gassy soup not a particularly
pleasant place to live
certainly not a place that you and i
could live and for a very long time
not a place that literally anything
could live
about two and a half to three billion
years ago we started seeing some
organisms appear
that worked out that they could turn
this process of all these gases that
kind of appeared on earth
suck them up and with some sunlight
start producing oxygen
these organisms are cyanobacteria and
they’re the ancestors of microalgae that
we still have on planet earth today
so all this time about two and a half
billion years ago
these tiny cyanobacteria were sucking up
carbon from our ancient atmospheres
producing oxygen at such a rate that
they were actually able
to produce earth’s atmosphere as we know
it today they produced so much oxygen
that all life on earth was
able to evolve and over time we started
seeing like plants and animals
dinosaurs all the way to humans you and
i appear on earth
all because these tiny organisms were
able to suck carbon from our atmosphere
and convert it into enough oxygen to
produce a livable atmosphere
so again what has this got to do with
your plastic plate
well these tiny organisms these tiny
ancestral algae
were so good at sucking carbon from the
atmosphere that over time
as they died they became compressed and
squished under the earth’s surface
this happened again and again and again
over billions and billions of years
until the point that they got into this
big kind of soupy stuff underneath the
earth’s surface
mixed in with things like dinosaur bones
and bits of plants
this is now what we call our fossil fuel
reserves
we see today that we then use these
fossil fuel reserves these ancient
bits of dead algae and carbon from our
ancient atmospheres
and turn it into things like fuel and
even plastics
so what we see is these ancient cells
get sucked up onto our earth’s surface
converted into things that you and i can
use
sometimes for a very short period of
time like for eating a sausage sandwich
and then they get disposed where again
over time they might be shredded
degraded and turned back into carbon
dioxide that’s returned to the
atmosphere
so what happens to this carbon that was
captured by these algae cells all these
billions of years ago
well once you’re done eating your
sausage sandwich off your plate
and you’ve disposed of that plastic
plate over time that plastic becomes
shredded and breaks down
depending on what type of plastic it is
this process may take a number of weeks
or hundreds of years that ancient carbon
that was captured by algae all those
billions of years ago
turned into fossil fuel reserves
extracted and processed and turned into
a plastic plate
then essentially returns back to the
atmosphere where
it’s starting to contribute to climate
change because additional carbon dioxide
is put back into the atmosphere
making it as unlivable as it was all
those billions of years ago
that’s a pretty big feat and a pretty
big journey for a tiny tiny little cell
to make
but we have to go back to this idea of
carbon
and we can sometimes think of carbon as
a pretty dirty word
but actually carbon isn’t dirty at all
although it makes up a lot of dirt
it’s also a really essential element
that makes up things like you and i
cars computers plants tree trunks and
the food that we eat
in fact everything organic on this
planet uses carbon as an essential
building block
there’s nothing bad about carbon except
it’s just one of those things that if
it’s in the wrong place and it’s
too much in a wrong place then it can
cause some pretty big problems
as we know a lot of the drivers of
global climate change is too much carbon
dioxide in our atmosphere and just like
our plastic plates
if we have carbon in the wrong place it
can cause some pretty big problems
so let me backtrack a little bit how do
we get plants to actually capture and
store carbon
and how do these ancient algae cells get
so good at capturing carbon from our
atmosphere and helping it turn into a
livable atmosphere
well like you and i plants and anything
that photosynthesize essentially breathe
except instead of breathing in oxygen
like you and i do
they breathe in carbon dioxide they
don’t need the oxygen so they put that
back out so we can actually breathe and
it forms a livable atmosphere
and the carbon that they’re able to
capture is incorporated in its leaves
its roots
if it has a trunk it’s incorporated in
its trunk and over time as that plant or
that tiny microscopic photosynthetic
cell grows
the carbon stays within its body then as
that plant or cell
dies the carbon stays within that bit of
leaf or that bit of twig or that bit of
trunk
and over time as it falls to maybe the
seabed
maybe the forest floor maybe a bottom of
a lake
it becomes compressed over time with
bits of sediment and dirt
and over time that becomes what we call
a stored carbon pool
this is really great because it means
that we’re able to store carbon in
different places across the earth and
photosynthesis is one of the most
efficient ways that we can pull carbon
from our atmosphere
although we think that carbon can cause
a lot of damage and you know on the
other side
makes up essential components of all
life on earth
carbon is also a really delicate thing
when i was researching
carbon in north sydney in a seagrass
motor a few years ago
we found a seagrass meadow that had been
performing this process this sucking up
carbon from the atmosphere
incorporating its leaves the leaves are
falling down they’re creating this
big muddy kind of composite of carbon
stock over time
for over 5 000 years that seagrass
meadow had been sitting there for longer
than your eye
will ever exist on this earth and had
been performing this process for so long
that it held such a rich carbon stock
that it could potentially offset
numerous people’s activities
however when we came back to the site a
few months later this meadow had been
dug up and all that carbon potentially
lost
meaning that carbon that had been
sitting there for up to 5000 years
potentially returned back to the
atmosphere going against what we’re
trying to do which is to mitigate
climate change
so how do we look back at these
processes the problems that have been
going on for billions of years capturing
carbon from our atmosphere with algae
and cyanobacteria
using seagrasses to capture carbon and
store it for so long
and help us to understand how these
processes can help us build a greener
future
well the processes that we’re trying to
change now are very similar to the
processes that existed all those
billions of years ago
we’re trying to capture carbon from our
atmosphere and store it for really long
times
and we’re also trying to make products
and things that you and i need to live
more sustainable so that we can continue
using them in the future
what if there was a way that we can
start to use these different
technologies these photosynthesis
and the ability of algae to produce oils
to develop new products and
help us to capture more carbon in the
making well
in laboratories and research centers
across the world this is exactly what’s
happening
we’re harnessing these tiny organisms
these micro algae
seaweeds and seagrasses to develop new
products and ways of capturing carbon
from our atmosphere
to help us both mitigate climate change
but to also develop new tools and
resources
to make industries more green you might
be thinking
how’s this possible well you might
remember that i was talking about how
micro algae cells are essentially what
our fossil fuels are made up of
and that’s because they’re so good at
producing oil that they can produce
massive reservoirs of it
if we’re to grow this micro algae on the
surface of our earth we can extract the
oil and make very similar products to
what you and i need
fossil fuels to make today things like
plastics and biodegradable foams
compostable
resources and things like clothing can
be made out of these products
i want to end this by saying that we as
a global community have a destination
that we
need to reach in terms of sustainability
and mitigating climate change
plants algae and photosynthesis are just
one of the vehicles that we can use to
reach this destination
but there are many other vehicles out
there that can help us get to the same
place
if i was to ask you one thing it would
be to go out there and find what these
are
across the world there’s many different
technologies evolutionary processes
and reservoirs of knowledge that are out
there that can help us get there but
it’s going to take your support
investment and engagement to really get
these things going
if i was to ask you one thing go out
there and find which ones to support
and don’t forget about the plastic plate
thanks
i’m alex thompson