Monday, March 28, 2011

Upside-down "Hills Hoist" - an idea about growing kelp in equatorial deep ocean

It occurs to me that one way of providing for the needs of kelp in deep ocean at the equator is to make something like an enormous, upside down, "Hills Hoist" circular clothes line and suspend this from a buoy.

Like the Hills Hoist clothes line [see Hills Products for examples of this] in which the central column can be wound up and down to facilitate easy hanging of cloths on the line, the upside down seaweed growing framework would be capable of being raised up at the start of a growing cycle to allow attachment of kelp and other seaweed seeds, and then lowered to the particular depth favoured by that species. Later the framework would be raised to facility harvesting and the seaweed. The buoys would need to be connected by a network of floating ropes or cables of which some would be linked no doubt to the Ocean Cities ice rafts. In order to keep the seaweed growing frameworks in good condition and not let them get damaged, or keep the kelp on them from being overshadowed by seaweed on other frameworks, some nodes of the network would need to be anchored to the sea floor four kilometres below.