Teams of Australian marine scientists have tested a technique they hope may give the Great Barrier Reef respite from coral bleaching caused by global heating. The experiment used a modified turbine with 100 high-pressure nozzles to spray trillions of nano-sized ocean salt crystals into the air from the back of a barge. The researchers hope the tiny salt crystals will mix with low-altitude clouds, making them brighter and reflecting more sunlight away from the ocean surface.

To know:
Marine cloud brightening also known as marine cloud seeding and marine cloud engineering is a proposed solar radiation management climate engineering technique that would make clouds brighter, reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space in order to offset anthropogenic global warming. Along with stratospheric aerosol injection, it is one of the two solar radiation management methods that may most feasibly have a substantial climate impact.

The central idea underlying marine cloud brightening is to add aerosols to atmospheric locations where clouds form. These would then act as cloud condensation nuclei, increasing the cloud albedo, which is the power a cloud has to reflect radiations.