2014Sep10 Snorkeling Biorock Artifical Reef

For my masters in Environmental Science I take a course called Environmental Restoration. Largely it's a paperwork course: we read copious articles about restoration and then discuss. But sometimes, we get to see actual restorations. On this occasion we went to the Fort Lauderdale, Florida site of the Lauderdale-by-the-Beach Biorock Artificial Reef project.

About the project: (from BioRockUSA):

(Quoted)

What will be visible from the shore will be two buoys covered with solar panels which will use sunlight to provide a completely safe low voltage trickle charge to six tunnel like open mesh steel structures on the sea floor below. The trickle charge will completely prevent any rusting of the steel and cause the slow growth of solid limestone rock over the structures. limestone is the natural mineral that makes up coral skeletons, reefs, tropical white sand beaches and most of Florida. Limestone is naturally dissolved in the ocean but does not spontaneously grow out of the water. The electrical charge causes it to grow over charged metal surfaces similar to the way that corals use energy to make their skeletons from naturally dissolved chemicals in the sea.

The ingenious Biorock process mimics the natural growth of coral reefs and was invented by a pioneering architect, the late Professor Wolf Hilbertz in the 1970's, as a way of growing natural building materials in the sea. Limestone has been used for construction since the pyramids of ancient Egypt. In the 1980's Hilbertz began working with Dr. Thomas Goreau, a coral reef specialist, to use the process to restore coral reefs. They and their students have built hundreds of Biorock coral reef and oyster reef restoration projects in more than 20 countries. They found that corals on these structures grow typically two to six times faster than normal and have sixteen to fifty times higher survival following severe high temperature episodes, events that have become more frequent in the last 20 years as the global warming impacts of rising atmospheric CO2 begin to be felt.

Furthermore, they find that large schools of fish, especially juveniles, are attracted to them. As a result, Biorock reefs have kept corals alive in places where they would have died and allowed new reefs to be grown back in a few years in damaged areas where no natural recovery have taken place.