In Baltic Sea, citizen divers restore seagrass to fight climate change

Subject: International Relations

Section: Places in news

Context:

Just off the coast of Kiel in northern Germany, scuba divers use hand trowels to dig up emerald green seagrass shoots complete with roots from a dense underwater meadow
This work is a part of a new project that trains local citizens to restore seagrass meadows in the Baltic Sea, that can help tackle climate change.

About SeaStore Seagrass Restoration Project:

Europe alone lost one third of its seagrass areas between the 1860s and 2016.
While there are other initiatives to restore the plants worldwide, the SeaStore Seagrass Restoration Project in Kiel, run by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, is one of the first that aims to enable citizens to do so autonomously.
The ultimate goal is to re-green the Baltic Sea.
The GEOMAR team was also researching how resistant seagrass was to temperature rises. It hopes to breed more heat-resistant strains since, unlike fish, seagrasses cannot migrate to cooler climes as the oceans warm.

Seagrass meadows:

A seagrass meadow or seagrass bed is an underwater ecosystem formed by seagrasses.
- Seagrasses are marine (saltwater) plants found in shallow coastal waters and in the brackish waters of estuaries.
- Seagrasses are flowering plants with stems and long green, grass-like leaves.
- They produce seeds and pollen and have roots and rhizomes which anchor them in seafloor sand.
The meadows act as vast natural sinks that can store millions of tonnes of carbon, but they have reduced sharply over the last century due to worsening water quality.
Seagrasses store more than twice as much carbon from planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) per square mile than forests do on land.
The plants also help support fisheries and protect coasts from erosion.

Baltic Sea:

The Baltic Sea is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean situated in Northern Europe.
It is a shelf sea and marginal sea of the Atlantic with limited water exchange between the two, making it an inland sea.
The Baltic Sea is one of the largest brackish inland seas by area.
It is enclosed by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Sweden and the North and Central European Plain.
The maximum depth is 459 m (1,506 ft) which is on the Swedish side of the center.
The northern part of the Baltic Sea is known as the Gulf of Bothnia.
The more rounded southern basin of the gulf is called Bothnian Sea and immediately to the south of it lies the Sea of Åland.
The Gulf of Finland connects the Baltic Sea with Saint Petersburg.
The Gulf of Riga is located between Estonia and Latvia.
The Baltic Sea is connected by artificial waterways to the White Sea via the White Sea–Baltic Canal and to the German Bight of the North Sea via the Kiel Canal.
The Helsinki Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area includes the Baltic Sea.