Seeing opportunity in rising oceans

Conservative projections say rising seas from climate change would displace hundreds of millions of people and cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next century. Sam Eaton found a scientist with a plan to capitalize on melting icecaps for the sake of everyone.

Big ideas, the kind that change the world, often come from the oddest places.

For atmospheric scientist Carl Hodges that place was 6,000 feet above Mexico's coastal desert, south of the Arizona border. And his idea, if it works, could stop one of global warming's most serious threats: Rising seas.But the source of Hodge's inspiration isn't the shrimp farms, it's the giant man-made canal that supplies them with a constant river of seawater.

That one pumping station with four pumps is as big as many rivers in the world. And that's what gave Hodges his "eureka" moment. These shrimp farms between here and Guaymas, which is only 100 miles to the south, pump more than 20 percent of the ice melt of the Antarctic.

Hodges started crunching the numbers and came up with the total volume of water flowing from the world's thawing icecaps and glaciers. "Four o'clock in the morning I'm at, 'Jesus, that's not very much.' I mean, I had this image of what it was and how much the sea level was rising. And I knew there was thermal expansion and all this, and that's not very much. And then I realized, my God, we can stop sea-level rise."

Especially with the right profit motive.

Near the Mexican fishing village of Bahia de Kino, Hodges is experimenting with what he hopes will become the world's next big cash crop. What look like rice fields stretch in every direction, turning this patch of desert scrubland into a green oasis.

This is Salicornia bigelovii. To be slightly modest, which I have propensity not to do at times, it's probably the reinvention of irrigated agriculture. That's because it doesn't use a drop of fresh water. The only thing these plants need to grow is the desert sunshine and a daily soaking of seawater.

The seeds are key to Hodges' vision. They pack as much high-quality vegetable oil as soybeans, making salicornia an ideal biofuel crop -- and a highly profitable one. Especially if the fertile effluent from those shrimp farms we saw from the air is used as the irrigation source.

Today that water flows back into the Sea of Cortez, causing huge dead zones along the coast. But it's not the environmental damage that bothers Hodges. It's the wasted opportunity.

Why not you take it inland, green the earth, make some money, and give a whole bunch of people jobs?

But for any of this to counter rising seas another step has to be taken. All that seawater pumped inland has to stay inland -- forever. And this is where the big science comes in.

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