Dryland spreader‑levee restoration isn’t just a land‑repair technique. It is a climate‑scale energy‑routing intervention

[Tom Harris]

Hi,

This is a very interesting approach proposed by Theodore Rethers of Australia. He has been researching this for a while and it's been trialled successfully by Queensland University. 

I can put people in touch and give you more background if anyones interested in learning more or helping to take it forward. 

https://substack.com/home/post/p-197422128

Thanks,

Tom

[Brian Cady]

Hi Tom, 

A similar concept was touched on within: 'Could seawater-flooded deserts help re-bind CO2 while supplementing fisheries?'

https://hopefulvision.blogspot.com/2011/07/could-seawater-flooded-deserts-help-re.html

Brian Cady

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For more from Brian, please see:
http://hopefulvision.blogspot.com

[Paul Klinkman]

Dear Action Committee,

You could have looked up these same concepts yesterday on my website .

My cost-efficient take on "spreader levees" is found at https://klinkmansolar.com/kwaterways.htm#W7b  I consider the correct way to design spreader levees so that a 1000 year flood doesn't ruin them or cause a catastrophic dam breach that causes flooding downstream.  On the other end of the weather, in a moderate drought we still want the water to be spread out and we also want oxygenation to be forced into the pondage to keep fish populations alive through the drought and to encourage natural CO2 sequestration in the water.   My sketches should be pretty beaver-friendly.  Whatever a spreader levee might be, these things won't design themselves.

"Creating saline marshes on desert sinks" is found at my https://klinkmansolar.com/kwaterways.htm#W3   I cost-efficiently design these marshes using a rice paddy design.

Yours,

Paul Klinkman

[Tom Goreau]

I’ve heard this idea many times from many people who came up with the idea on their own.

 

The reason it won’t work is that evaporation will turn the soil so salty that it will kill any vegetation, and you will get salt flats with bacteria, not mangroves or salt marsh loaded with carbon.

 

Thomas J. F. Goreau, PhD
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance

Chief Scientist, Biorock Technology Inc., Blue Regeneration SL

Technical Advisor, Blue Guardians Programme, SIDS DOCK

37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

gor...@globalcoral.org
www.globalcoral.org
Phone: (1) 857-523-0807 (leave message)

 

Books:

Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase

https://www.routledge.com/Geotherapy-Innovative-Methods-of-Soil-Fertility-Restoration-Carbon-Sequestration-and-Reversing-CO2-Increase/Goreau-Larson-Campe/p/book/9781466595392

 

Innovative Methods of Marine Ecosystem Restoration

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.1201/b14314/innovative-methods-marine-ecosystem-restoration-robert-kent-trench-thomas-goreau

 

On the Nature of Things: The Scientific Photography of Fritz Goro

 

Geotherapy: Regenerating ecosystem services to reverse climate change

 

No one can change the past, everybody can change the future

 

It’s much later than we think, especially if we don’t think

 

Those with their heads in the sand will see the light when global warming and sea level rise wash the beach away

 

“When you run to the rocks, the rocks will be melting, when you run to the sea, the sea will be boiling”, Peter Tosh, Jamaica’s greatest song writer

 

“The Earth is not dying, she is being killed” U. Utah Phillips

 

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies” Noam Chomsky

 

 

 

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[Paul Klinkman]

Dear Actions,

One countersuggestion is then to regularly circulate new seawater into the marshland and drain the somewhat evaporated seawater back to the ocean.

Yours in Hope,

Paul.Klinkman

[Tom Goreau]

Pumping that amount of water to prevent salinizing the soil will co$t!

 

 

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[Brian Cady]

HI Tom,

Perhaps it would be possible to arrange salt pond fields/terraces/paddies in a sequence, so that they are increasingly salty, ending in a salt production field, with brine shrimp production along the way, and so on. One thus might make salt, raise brine shrimp and halophytes and such along the way to the final salt fields. Mangroves may not work, perhaps needing less salt than straight seawater, although I've heard of mangroves grown off the Eritrean coast with iron and other nutrient provision in seawater. 

Do you have insight on this, Tom?

Brian

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[Brian Cady]

I understand that, compared to heating water, moving water is relatively energy-cheap. Windpower along the desert shores and besides the dikes & terraces and such, might economically power water movement.

Brian

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[Tom Goreau]

I edited the last publication by the late Gordon Sato, who developed the project growing mangroves in desert coasts of Eritrea in places that they had never existed (attached, citation below).

 

Mangrove Afforestation on Arid Coasts and Possible Creation of Mangrove Forests on the Great Deserts of the World to Relieve Global Warming, 2014,

S. Gebrekiros, A. Fisseha, H. Karim, S. Negassi, M. Fischer, E. Yemane, J. Teclemariam, R. Riley & G. Sato, in THE GREEN DISC. NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR A NEW FUTURE: INNOVATIVE METHODS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, T. Goreau (Ed.),

Small Island Developing States Partnership in New Sustainable Technologies

 

His great insight was that the absence of mangroves there was due to lack of nutrients rather than lack of freshwater and he devised ingenious and simple ways to address them.

 

Unfortunately the Eritrea project was destroyed by those seeking political credit rather than results…….

[Brian Cady]

Tom, From Gordon and all's article title, they saw mangroves on deserts as an enormous opportunity.

The attached pictures came through, but the 'Gordon Sato.pdf' was empty.

I couldn't get greenthindisc.com to work, and the web archive has a similar problem.

Could you share again the file of Gordon Sato's last paper?

Brian

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[Tom Goreau]

Sorry about, saved in wrong format, here’s the paper!

 

He clearly proved his point about Eritrea, but applying this to the Sahara, or to the Great Australian Desert, requires pumping sea water vast distances, and only slightly more saline brine back. I think this was an afterthought, like most carbon credit schemes, but I don’t think Gordon appreciated the role of hypersaline limitation of mangroves. Mangroves are highly adapted to remove salt from sea water, but when salt is not much more concentrated, it kills them. This is very apparent not only in deserts but in semi-deserts and arid lands too. When you go inland from the sea the mangroves get shorter and shorter and vanish at the edge of the salt flats.

[Brian Cady]

Thank you, Tom,

What promising work this is.

I picture mangroves growing in seawater-level salinity pond fields, 'early' in a pond field sequence that ends in salt flats, with increasingly saline pond fields between these. 

I imagine various plants and creatures inhabiting these increasingly saline pond fields, each adapted to that pond field's salinity; and each yielding useful things grown from the desert sunlight there.

I understand that mangroves grow to two hundred feet tall in favorable situations.

Brian

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[Tom Goreau]

Thanks for these comments. That was indeed the late Gordon Sato’s aim.

 

He was a very distinguished biochemical researcher who used his money from patenting new medicines to set up the Manzanar Foundation to grow mangroves, and a wonderful human being.

 

Manzanar was the name of the American desert concentration camp where Sato, as a Japanese-American, was imprisoned during World War II.

 

Sadly his pioneering Eritrean projects were destroyed by politics, and promises of funding from Persian Gulf emirates proved false.

 

One person who has tried to continue Gordon’s pioneering work is Neal Spackman, who similarly ran into false promises of funding.

 

Until there is serious funding for blue carbon sequestration, there won’t be much support for these projects, although Gordon based his work purely on the environmental and economic benefits.

[Tom Goreau]

With regard to mangrove tree heights, that is a very interesting story, reflecting the unrecognized role of nutrient limitation, water exchange, and salinity in mangrove growth. Overall, based on plant heights, most mangroves are nutrient limited.

 

The tallest mangroves, around 50 meters or more tall, are found in the Darien, Panama, and adjacent Choco, Colombia. These grow along well-flushed tidal creeks that drain the rapidly flowing rivers eroding the northernmost Andes Mountains, in the wettest, lushest and most species-rich jungles on Earth.

 

On the other hand you can find stunted dwarf mangroves of the same species, hundreds of years old, only 10-20 cm tall in poorly-flushed nutrient-starved areas, especially along the inland fringes where salt flats build up from inundation at extreme high tides. The Persian Gulf, Red Sea, the Sea of Cortes, Australia, and similar desert habitats are lined with ancient dwarf mangroves. They are common in the Bahamas, and in Florida the construction of highway embankments across the Everglades have blocked flow of nutrients and resulted in large areas of stunted dwarf mangroves. Careful experimentation in these areas along the lines of Gordon Sato’s work might result in huge improvements in productivity and ecosystem services on land and in the sea!

[Paul Klinkman]

A partial solution to this  subproblem must focus on driving down the cost of pumping.  

Wind and solar are intermittent.  As long as we're pumping uphill to a fairly large pond or reservoir, we can pump while the wind blows or while the sun shines.

With wind, my inventor's instinct says to convert wind power directly to air pressure in the wind turbine using gears.  Air pressure can be cheaply shipped down the frame of the wind mill (no, not the wind turbine this time) and out to cylinders with one way valves for air powered pumping.  As the air goes into the cylinder, water is forced out of one of the one way valves and upward a few feet.  A line of canals and several air pumps should pump water uphill a few feet at a time to the holding pond.  No, there's no fossil fuel used except for the construction of the canals and holding pond.. With climate change, wind speeds are increasing.

If somebody hasn't built such a prototype already because it's so simple, someone should.  This is true of lots and lots of other climate-related prototypes.  Every government pleads, "no money", but they all have billions to waste on joke solutions such as nuclear power and clean coal.

Yours in Hope,

Paul Klinkman

[Tom Goreau]

A great idea worth trying! When the wind is strong it would be the equivalent of high tide inundation of mangroves and salt marsh.

 

Unfortunately your claim: With climate change, wind speeds are increasing seems to be incorrect, the wind is unfortunately NOT getting stronger everywhere.

 

Here in Massachusetts the Blue Hills Observatory has seen a very significant long term decrease in wind speeds in all seasons:

 

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022AGUFM.A51G..02I/abstract

 

Long-Term Declining Trends in Historical Wind Speed Measurements at the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, 1885-2021

·         Iacono, Michael J.  ;

 

·         Azorin-Molina, Cesar ;

 

·         Zhou, Chunlue

Abstract

The Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, located on the 635-foot summit of Great Blue Hill ten miles south of Boston, Massachusetts, has been the site of continuous monitoring of the local weather and climate since its founding in 1885. The meticulous, extensive, and high-quality climate record maintained at this location has included the measurement of wind among many other parameters since its earliest days, and this provides a unique opportunity to examine seasonal and annual wind speed trends at this site over more than 135 years. Although multiple wind sensors have been in use during this time and the height of the anemometers was raised in 1908, the wind records have been made as consistent as possible through careful analysis of these changes and the application of adjustments to ensure consistency. An analysis of wind data homogeneity is being performed to associate statistical change points in monthly mean wind speeds to the documented wind instrument metadata. The running 30-year mean wind speed at Blue Hill Observatory has decreased from 7.0 m s-1 in the middle 20th century to its present value of 5.7 m s-1 with an increase in the rate of the decline beginning around 1980, and these changes persist in all seasons. The annual wind speed time series shows a significant (p < 0.05) downward trend over the entire period of record from 1885-2021 (-0.103 m s-1 decade-1) that is steeper and is also significant for the sub-periods from 1961-2021 (-0.274 m s-1 decade-1) and 1979-2012 (-0.339 m s-1 decade-1; the lowest annual mean wind speed was recorded in 2012). In addition, daily wind data for the last 60-70 years have been digitized including wind speed, peak gust, fastest mile, and prevailing direction, and this detailed metadata provides further characterization of the wind changes in recent decades at this location. The declining wind speed trend at Blue Hill has significant implications for the efficiency of wind power generation in the area if it reflects a regional shift in the near-surface wind regime and for the analysis of causal changes in large-scale climate dynamics.

Publication:

 

AGU Fall Meeting 2022, held in Chicago, IL, 12-16 December 2022, id. A51G-02.

 

Pub Date:

 

December 2022

 

There is similar data from many other places indicating long term global decrease in wind speeds, or “stilling”:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_terrestrial_stilling

 

One would intuitively expect increased temperature and energy content to increase wind speeds in general, if nothing else because the friction coefficient with topography should decrease, but local patterns appear to very hard to infer from global predictions!

 

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[Tom Goreau]

One would expect coastal wind speed to increase due the global pattern of the land warming faster than the ocean causing an increased temperature, pressure, and buoyancy gradient.

 

Studies of long term wind change over the ocean shows that most of the ocean has also had a long term decline in wind speed, but the pattern is not uniform, and some areas show distinct increases. I reviewed changes in temperature, primary productivity, and wind speed some years ago, and found that wind speeds was slowing over the great ocean gyres where primary productivity was collapsing.

 

T.J. Goreau R.L. Hayes, & D. McAllister, 2005, Regional patterns of sea surface temperature rise: implications for global ocean circulation change and the future of coral reefs and fisheries, WORLD RESOURCE REVIEW, 17: 350-374

[Tom Goreau]

You can see the decrease in red mangrove height moving inland from the shore very clearly on semi-arid Barbuda!

 

Because the Biorock process greatly increases growth of seagrass and salt marsh plants, both above and below ground, we might expect similar effects with mangroves on Barbuda.

 

I’m eager to get back to Barbuda with some solar panels to experiment!

 

From: John Mussington <john.mu...@gmail.com>

Date: Saturday, May 16, 2026 at 11:01
To: Tom Goreau <gor...@globalcoral.org>

Cc: Brian Cady <brianc...@gmail.com>, Tom Harris <hp...@tomharris.uk>, Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Mangrove growth

Thanks Tom.

 

Interesting observations.  There is quite a bit of variation in mangrove heights in the various wetlands in Barbuda. The largest ones I've seen definitely coincides with sites where high rates of flushing and nutrients occur. 

 

John 

 

John Mussington

Spring View

Barbuda

Antigua and Barbuda

[Brian Cady]

Tom and Paul, thanks for your notes,

Paul, Joe Seale at New Alchemy Institute decades ago looked into pumping air with wind turbines. He noted that as compressed, thus hot, air cooled, much condensation occurred. 

But more to the point, as compressed humid air expands through little turbines to drive things (like water pumps), the air cools, the humidity freezes and the turbine jams, unless the turbine is designed to be inefficient, as most air tools' turbines are.

In a desert, the initial condensation could be a boon. But final turbine inefficiency, or the cost of drying the compressed air sufficiently, discourage storing power as compressed air.

On the other hand, storing water behind dams/dykes/... is a  very economical power storage, used in western pumped storage plants to store off-peak power until peak demand. Hence I believe pumping only while wind blows or sun shines probably would work fine.

Tom, I'm saddened to hear of wind speed reductions, but thanks for conveying this news.

Brian

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