A Pilot Project

Start with a pilot project

1. Take a few thousand croffles by sea to the “rubbish patch” in the Pacific.

A huge area exists in the Pacific between Hawaii and California where currents cause floating objects to collect. At present this is recognised as a plastics hazard area. Hence the name. The Size of this patch is 1.6 million sq.km., more than double the size of Texas. There are also several smaller such stable zones in our oceans.

2. Er, before that, Make those croffles reflective. And findable.

The types of croffle in the pilot study will include spheres of glass and polyester, externally metalised by electrostatic spray.  Also bottle types designed to float upside down with metallised bases. White or super white paint can also to be evaluated. White paint uses titanium dioxide, it is already a good reflector. Super white can be made by adding other metal oxides.  Aluminium cans or aluminum foil can be sealed up.

The pilot project is to check the durability and choose the right croffle for mass production. Those first ones will be radio tagged so that they can be found again and evaluated during, say, six months.

3 Commission mass production

Many plastics companies already make croffles and many more can be encouraged to tool up. Bottle and Aluminium Can makers can be enlisted. The scale required is already found in bottle manufacture,  in glass, aluminium and various plastics. Making them shiny or plain white is part of the development.

Another possibility is a ship mounted machine working aluminium foil from reels to generate floating aluminum mirrors which I call DROPs. (Doubled-up Reflective Ocean Packets).

Hopefully this will be an international collective mass production.

4 Monitor progress

Existing satellites already measure albedo and can photograph the Earth surface. The effect of the 'Sea Stars' mirror will be detectable as soon as deployment starts and ships already visit that area of the Pacific. 

5 Keep releasing reflective croffles until the job is done

The Sea Stars do not mean we give up on limiting CO2 or preventing leaks of CH4 but they will give us time to develop the technologies required. The future management of the Ocean Mirror can be an ongoing commitment to geo-engineering our planet for the benefit of all. Even the growing mirror will help, and the improved albedo can be monitored continuously.

6 Monitor the geo-engineering for ever as we learn to manage CO2.

The target must be to lower the natural methane production while we work on man made release too. Monitoring methane is of course already happening.

Cost estimates:

The pilot project is not expensive because it can use existing shipping and a few thousand croffles.

The most expensive element is the radio tagging to monitor the survivability.

The Deployment

Large manufacturing projects trend towards the raw material costs. That is how  trillions of Croffles in the deployment phase are estimated to cost 100 Billion USD. 

Or about 10 billion dollars each year.

• Mass of one (sample) croffle: 150 mm diameter, 90 grams.

• Mass per trillion such croffles: 100 million tons

• Cost of formed and coloured plastics, estimate 0.5 USD per kg, 

• bulk cost aluminium 0.3 USD per kg

• Cost per trillion, 30 to 50 billion USD

• Area of a trillion 150mm croffles: 18,000 square kilometres.

• 15 trillion of those croffles required. (The optimum croffle size still to be determined)

Tagging

The pilot project stage of Ocean Mirror, or oceanmirror, is to release a few thousand reflective croffles or shade balls into the Pacific. by ship launch.  Each croffle in the pilot will also be tagged so that it can be found again for monitoring.  The tag needs to be attached to the Croffle.

In the case of balls, a harness will be required. This could be of plastic but then plastics may be unpopular since plastics are already accumulating in the rubbish patch AKA the garbage patch in the Pacific.  So a metal wire style harness may be preferred or a biodegradable harness.  

The tag can be a transponder which is a radio tuned coil as used in retail tagging.  It resonates to a drive signal and reradiates a radio signal which can be picked up.  This type has range limitations.

Another type has an active radio with a battery which again is switched off normally but turn on in response to a special frequency and transmits data.  The life is limited by the battery but these can be very suitable for this task.  They are used for animal tracking in the oceans for example.  But they are more expensive than simple tags.

A third and similar type radiate all the time with a reduced life time. These will not have enough duration.

A fourth possibility will be a more complex tag with either battery or solar panel so that it can broadcast all the time or on a time schedule.

In bottle designs, the tag can be in the bottle and sealed.  Bottle designs are interesting because of the world capacity for making glass bottles. Radio signals can work through glass but the effect of a white loading of TiO2 must be investigated. the signal might be trapped and then an external tag is necessary.

This aspect of geo-engineering can also be regarded as carbon offset, for which there are already financial schemes.

Measuring Albedo

Global warming is in the news all the time.  This year 2023, the loss of Antarctic ice and Greenland Ice has been at record levels, meaning record low levels.  This ice loss directly reduces Albedo.  And loss of albedo is a warming effect.

Albedo is measured with a pyranometer. This instrument has a detector facing upwards and another downward.  the detectors measure radiation across all frequencies and the difference between the upward value and the downward value is the albedo.

For example over an ocean the typical upward value is just 8% of the downward value.

A pyranometer can be in a satellite of aircraft, or near the surface.  The values obtained will not be the same because as the measurement goes higher, the incoming radiation increases while the outgoing radiation decreases.  So the albedo looks worse when viewed from space.  That is because the atmosphere is absorbing and reflecting various frequencies.  The global warming greenhouse effect therefore affects the albedo measurement.  However, the basic reflecting effect is a separate issue from the greenhouse effect.

A pyranometer can even be actually at the surface.  For example a special floating pyranometer could be designed to float on the ocean.  In that case it would need stabilising to reduce wave effects but the signal could be averaged over a long time.  Of course, such an instrument cannot detect the croffles. So it would be a baseline measure of Ocean Albedo, but even that would be interesting because it might change as a result of surface water changes caused by the large distributed mirror.