December 15, 2020 - Could an innovative solution by Professor Stasa Puskaric of RIT Dubrovnik involving marine snow be a game-changer in the climate change battle?

I have come to accept my fate. 

Every time I think I have covered all the best stories of Croatian excellence, along comes another one. I now realise that if I continue to write for TCN for the rest of my life, there will always be just one more inspirational story still to be written. 

I have also realised another truism. If you surround yourself with positive people and stories, your surrounding environment will also be more positive. 

And so it was that I opened an email from a recent LinkedIn connection, a chap by the name of Mark Gero, with a story of Croatian innovation that he thought TCN would like to cover. 

He was right. 

I must confess that I had never heard either of marine snow or Profesor Stasa Puskaric, a lecturer at RIT Zagreb, but half an hour later, I was much better informed on both, as well as the plan to significantly reduce carbon emissions - up to 20% of annual global emissions, no less - by offering an innovative geological rather than biological solution. 

The story looked interesting, and so I decided to look into both marine snow and the Croatian professor, starting - as I often do with my research for stories - on Facebook. 

Professor Puskaric obviously had pedigree and credibility, and he appeared on the popular Ice on Fire documentary on climate change and climate change solutions produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio on HBO last year - you can see the trailer above. 

He also gave a fascinating TEDx talk in Zagreb back in 2016 on the subject of carbon removal, which I heartily recommend, but what really won me over before I watched it were the first results of my Facebook search. 

I figured out that one of my friends in Dubrovnik had been one of his students (he currently lectures at RIT Zagreb), and I asked her to tell me a little about him.

Brilliant mind, inventor, i think he has a patent for a flushless toilet - a WC that doesn’t need water, he loves the island of Mljet, the environment, he claims he holds a formula for eliminating excess CO2 from the atmosphere, and he doesn’t have it 100% written down - he holds a part of the formula inside of his head in case someone tries to abuse it. 

He was my professor and he left a very big impression on me because he’s truly one of a kind person. He held classes sotto voce - he spoke silently (not too silent) so we were forced to listen to him. He is indeed a bit eccentric. 

Oooh yes, and Caolerpa Racemosa, an algae that escaped from Monaco aquarium and came to the Adriatic, very invasive, Stasa figured out how to eliminate it, had a “battle” with the authorities, but they wouldn’t listen to him.

It turned out from a little more research that the flushless toilet did exist and was alive and well on Mljet, if not other locations. It was actually Swedish technology that he tinkered with and popularised in Dalmatia.  

So what is the plan to save the planet? 

Science is not my strong suit, but the plan looks fascinating and, dare I say it, achievable. 

I learned that marine snow is mostly organic detritus falling from the upper levels of the ocean. It consists of organic matter, including dead or dying matter and plants (phytoplankton), fecal matter, sand, and a variety of inorganic particles.  Marine snow is a naturally occurring organic matter which absorbs atmospheric CO2, depositing it permanently on the deep ocean floor permanently.

Puskaric and the team at GEA@275 have come up with a unique carbon sequestration method, which is apparently the only one in existence capable of removing CO2 back into the geologocial, rather than biological, cycle. The process is scrupulously ecological, using only processes that occur naturally in the oceans, causing no interference with natural eco-systems.

The method, which has been proved to be effective on a small scale, is capable of removing measurable amounts of CO2 and lowering carbon concentration from above 400 ppm to the Earth's historical average of 275 ppm, thereby generating a large amount of carbon offsets. This could lead to a global expansion of the carbon market, with the option to develop or buy.

In order to move the project forward, an investment of some 15 million euro is required, a sizable amount of which 3 million has already been pledged by REVOcean, leaving 12 million still to be found. The investment would fund global IP protection, consultant agreements, lab equipment and instrumentation. A 3-week cruise in the Antarctic circumpolar current conducting on-deck measurements would precede the transportation of 2000 litres of filtered sea water to a Norwegian laboratory, after which a year of laboratory experiments on isolated phytoplankton species from the Southern Ocean would ensure.

The oceans absorb roughly 25% of the atmospheric CO2 emitted each year, which makes the oceans more acidic and less able to capture CO2 in the future. Puskaric's plan is to use marine snow as a drawdown method, which could remove up to 20% of the world's annual emissions. This would slow down both global warming and ocean acidifcation.

During his TEDx talk Puskaric proposed the use of marine snow in an area of 100,000 km2 to a depth of 50 metres in the southern oceans over four months, he said that the marine snow would be responsible for the removal of up to one billion tons of carbon, or 3% of global emissions. GEA@275 has the potential to remove at least 8 billion tons a year - more with more boats - equivalent to 20% of annual carbon emissions.  

According to Puskaric, the region of the southern oceans has the highest concentration of nutrients for plant growth, more than all the other seas and oceans worldwide. It is, he says, the only natural system available to us to deal with so much carbon in the atmosphere. 

Puskaric has developed a form of marine snow in the laboratory has exactly the same characteristics as natural marine snow. 

I will stop there, as science is not my strong suit, as stated above. But for much more, check out the official website - and I am curious to hear the thoughts of those more acquainted with the science than I am. It certainly looks well worth investigating further.  

What other innovations are coming out of Croatia? Find out by following the TCN Made in Croatia page.