Ideaplants

Nature does not stop where land ends. We all have heard about reefs that are being threatened due to over fishing, water pollution and other factors that cause damage under sea level. But have you ever thought about doing something about it?

Professor Wolf Hilbertz could be described as ‘architect of the ocean’. Together with his colleagues from the Global Coral Reef Alliance (GCRA) have developed a way of recreating the reef a technique seems very simple – so simple that eventually a five year old would be able to dream it up: What do we do with all the corals and fish if their reef is being destroyed? Let’s build them a new home!

The actual execution of such a project requires however a firm technique, lots of manpower, and support of experts like Professor Hilbertz of the GCRA: A huge structure of iron bars is build on land and then transported to the reef location. Slowly and with lots of patience a group of scuba divers help to safely guide the big and fragile structure to its final location. After it has been placed they fix fractures of corals that are broken off a former reef on the iron bars of the structure.

Its not as easy as it sounds to actually make a reef ‘grow’ on such an artificial surrounding – but there is a solution: A technique called Electrolytic Mineral Accretion Technology (BiorockTM). This is a method that causes the crystallization of minerals on the outside of the iron structure by creating safe, low voltage electrical currents through the seawater. This technique speeds up the formation and growth of chemical limestone rock shell-bearing organisms and skeletons of corals. The reef starts grows rapidly.

Professor Wolf Hilbertz passed away in August 2007 but his dream still exists: The recreation of reefs which is a milestone in saving one of our biggest and for a big part still unexplored natural resources: the Ocean.

Here a case study from Pemuteran, Bali:

Images by Wolf Hilbertz; video by Rani Morrow-Wuigk.

For further details visit: www.globalcoral.org