The “poop pump” spread from Whales to the Rescue. Art by Kim Smith.

A few days ago there was an interesting program on the CBC show, The Current, on which the host Matt Galloway interviewed a few scientists with some ideas about how we might buy a bit of time in our race against a warming ocean and atmosphere. (You can see the full transcript here. Just scroll down to “The ambitious science of climate repair.”) I was listening while doing a bit of busy work, but my ears perked up when Galloway introduced Sir David King, director of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge, who discussed seeding the ocean with artificial whale poo. If you’ve read Whales to the Rescue, you’ll know that the role of whale poo and how it can help pull carbon out of the atmosphere is a big part of the book, and a big part of whale baleen whales have a role to play in helping to slow the effects of climate change. Adding artificial whale feces to the ocean is all still experimental, but I’ll follow this with interest. (If you want to read more, here is the link to the “biomass regeneration project“—aka replicating the pooping prowess of the world’s large baleen whales—at the Climate Repair site.)

Here is an article about then project from last spring and here’s a video of an fake whale poo experiment off the Australian coast, called WhaleX.

What do you think? I can’t find much recent news, so things still seem pretty experimental, but I’ll keep following this one.