Someone recently asked us how long it would take, if a big glacier fell into the ocean somewhere, for water levels to equalize globally. Which was especially interesting because we did not have a pat answer, and to come up with something credible we had to take into account not just the obvious fact of the seas being interconnected, and very complex in their behaviour, but also the often forgotten or overlooked question of just how big the Earth is. As planets go not very; you could fit 1,300 of old Terra into one Jupiter (and yes, on the flip side, 153 Mercurys into one Earth). And we bring it up here particularly because Canary Media recently lamented “Running Tide’s ill-fated adventure in ocean carbon removal” where, after grabbing giant grants from gullible tech giants like Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a company dumped wood chips into the sea and they sank and that was that. What did anyone expect? That the weather would change? Apparently so. But it was a silly thing to believe.

The original idea, hardly less silly, was apparently to make tiny little buoys, spray them with kelp spores, and then suddenly a bunch more kelp would grow than that dopey evolution could manage and voila, hundreds of years of carbon sinking and blessed relief from the dreaded warmth. With the help of the tech geniuses Running Tide “went on to raise millions of dollars from Silicon Valley funders.” Wuk wuk wuk. But not kelp kelp kelp.

What they really did instead was sink:

“wood chips coated with lime-kiln dust, not kelp-laced buoys. In fact, last summer, Running Tide dumped 15 cargo loads of wood chips off the coast of Iceland, to fulfill its contracts with Shopify and then Microsoft.”

Canute, call your office. Imagine thinking 15 cargo loads of wood chips, which is a lot to humans but peanuts to the ocean, would actually change the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere in significant ways, let alone significantly beneficial. The hubris is astounding. As is the gullibility of woke Big Tech, evidently.

For starters, if it did actually have an effect, as with the kelp plan, what possible reason exists for thinking it would not simply displace something that was going to happen anyway? It’s worth remembering that the ocean seems to have been sequestering carbon for millions of years, on a vast scale, largely in the shells of tiny calcareous critters. (A calcareous shell being mostly calcium carbonate or CaCO3.) Too much loose talk of “tipping point” may have convinced the credulous that a bit of wood could dramatically accelerate the process. But of course it couldn’t.

For another thing, what if it did? Environmentalists who once used the “Precautionary Principle” to stop just about anything are remarkably blithe about various freelance efforts to change the whole planet and hope it works out exactly as planned, including private releases of balloons filled with sulphur dioxide to try to cool the place. If it works and the glaciers come back, “Oops” won’t quite cover it. And if we really did manage to get the oceans to slurp down so much carbon that we got down from the perilous 180 ppm of atmospheric CO2 during the Last Glacial Maximum to 150, all the C3 plants would die and when they go, we go.

On the other hand, that balloon contained “1,030 grams of SO2” and if you think a kilo of some gas can change the behaviour of the atmosphere you’ve been reading too much António Guterres or something.

The Earth, we remind you, has a diameter of roughly 12,742 kilometres, a surface area of about 510 million square kilometres (or 197 million square miles), about 71% of it ocean water, and according to Wikipedia a mass of (we won’t keep saying “about” because they're all approximations) 5.9 times 10 to the 24^th power so that’s 13 septillion pounds or 6.5 sextillion tons. Which is big.

By comparison the oceans are a bit small, a mere 1.35 quintillion metric tons or 1.35 sextillion kg, just 1/4400 of the total mass. OK. Very big. But not compared to their host. There’s a meme out there online, and it was around before the internet because we heard it when we were young, that if the Earth were the size of a billiard ball it would be smoother. Which turns out to be true. Still, sextillion is big.

Then there’s the sky. The atmosphere is big but most of the mass, three quarters of it, is within 11 km of the surface.

The “thermosphere“, for instance, is a very strange place where technically it’s extremely hot, some 4,500F, because what few molecules it contains are in a state of extreme agitation. But you’d freeze to death in such conditions if you could hold your breath long enough not to suffocate first. And it’s some 513 km thick. So big, hot, cold and empty.

Are we being pedantic, or cutting and pasting? No. We’re emphasizing the amazing scale and complexity of the biosphere. For instance, the lowest and densest tropospheric layer is warmer at the surface and colder at the top. The next, the stratosphere, is the opposite. And at 35 km thick, it contains almost all the remaining air. Then comes the mesosphere which, like the troposphere, gets colder as you go higher. The thermosphere (which is where the International Space Station orbits) does the reverse. As for the exosphere, well, it’s pretty much space.

Now, take a balloon and change them significantly. Absurd, right?

OK, let’s get back to the oceans. Remember, we’re talking 1.35*10^18 metric tons. Which is also, of course, 1.35*10^18 cubic metres. Now if you ask “What is the carrying capacity of a freighter” you get back the answer that freighters come in a lot of different sizes. But a big modern one can carry 24,000 TEU or “Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit” containers, each roughly 15 square metres, so 360,000 cubic metres. If Running Tide used 15 of that sort of freighter, and we’re not sure it did, then 5,400,000 cubic metres. One two hundred and fifty billionth of the volume of the oceans. And yet nothing happened. How strange. Or not, since it’s the equivalent if you weighed 100 kg (and we’re not saying you do) of taking 4 billionths of a gram of something and expecting your health to change. (A standard alcoholic drink contains 13.45 grams of pure alcohol, incidentally.)

Now Canary Media does say of the demise of Running Tide that “Its story has a lot to teach us about trying to geoengineer our way out of climate change.” Running Tide said send more money; its farewell notice on LinkedIn said:

“Unfortunately, today we are beginning the process of shutting down Running Tide’s global operations because we are unable to secure the right kind of financing to continue our work with the urgency it requires.”

Well, it’s one perspective. And it does matter because, Canary explains:

“Startups fail all the time, but Running Tide’s demise made waves in the world of carbon dioxide removal. At its height of 140 employees, the company was one of the largest carbon-removal startups operating in the ocean — if not the largest — and the first to sell ocean carbon credits.”

And they almost learn a lesson about hubris.

“There’s no doubt that the world needs to move rapidly to address climate change, but investing millions of dollars in untested, unvetted methods wastes not only resources but also time, when there’s none to spare. It also entrusts the ocean’s intricate, delicate ecosystems to a handful of private investors more familiar with microchips than microorganisms. Should we really try to hack the ocean to save the earth?”

But the big point here is that the ocean’s ecosystems may be intricate, and in some particulars delicate. But the problem with hacking the oceans isn’t that it was “private investors” who didn’t know from bugs. It wouldn’t work better with governments filled with Michael Manns and Katherine Hayhoes. It’s that the oceans are extremely big and their ecosystems are intensely dynamic with feedback loops we can’t just switch on and off with a handful of sawdust. As any sane person surely already knew.

P.S. If you’re wondering about the original question, and where our glacier or its ripples went, it depends how big you mean by big in that context. Tsunamis can cross the deep ocean at up to 500 km/h and the 600-foot-high waves from the disastrous Chicxulub asteroid impact 65 million years ago hit Europe and Africa within six hours and everywhere within 15 (the blazing vitreous rock “tektites” having hit within an hour so it hardly mattered). So yes, if the entire Greenland icecap slid into the ocean, they’d know about it in Japan within a day and it would be bad. But if it were just some random typical calving, even a big one, the combined effects of tides, currents and winds piling up water mean it would never be measurable at any significant distance. The Earth is so big that its tiny oceans are also huge, and trying to change them with a balloon or some wood chips is risible hubris.