The artificial waste could fertilize the ocean and sequester carbon

In the 20th century, people’s demand for whale blubber and baleen drove industrial whalers to kill roughly three million whales—a whopping 99 percent of the world’s large whale population. The intensive hunting not only devastated ocean ecosystems, but it also dismantled a key mechanism for moving nutrients through marine food webs. As a result, the whalers built up an ecological debt that we have yet to pay off.

Image: Grabiel Dizzi, Unsplash