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By Susan Lahey

When people talk about consciousness, or the mind, it’s always a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.

In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.

The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., first posited in the 1990s: the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.

Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).

Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.

Across the Universe

To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.

Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.

But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.

Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.

New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.

Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.

Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.

Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.

The Architecture of Universal Consciousness

Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”

That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.

You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.

He found that if initial conditions were different by even one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.

Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.

“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”

Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.

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Architecture serves as the timestamp of an era and the largest of ecological footprints.

Architect James Ramsey ’99 spoke at a talk for the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities on Nov. 10, 2022 at the Humanities Quadrangle. The talk showcased recent innovation in architecture through Ramsey’s work on the New York City Lowline and prompted conversation on the anthropocene and the current climate crisis.

“Someday everything we ever build will be gone,” Ramsey told the News. “Can we use architecture and design to sort of communicate impermanence? Or for that matter, communicate to someone viewing these pieces of art or installation the sense that things are transitory; [that we are] miniscule … in the face of deep geological time.”

Having studied both physics and architecture as a Yale undergraduate before ultimately deciding to major in the latter, James Ramsey has an eye for problem-solving and innovation. From commissioned modernist homes and art museums to the New York City Lowline and an upcoming elephant sanctuary in Kenya, Ramsey’s work covers a wide range.

During his time at Yale, Ramsey said he was particularly inspired by the design of the Beinecke Library. He pointed out another “cool architectural moment on campus,” a passageway on the side of Davenport College.

“You have this really subtle architectural transition from Gothic to … Georgian style,” Ramsey said. “And little by little as you walk through it, it’s almost like walking through a time machine.”

Ramsey says he was influenced by Shigeru Miyamoto — one of the game designers of Super Mario Bros. — as well as two of the professors he had during his time at Yale: Stanley Insler and Harvey Weiss.

“[Insler and Weiss] were able to take their experiences of hyperspecialization, but also … their broad knowledge about a great many fields and use those to draw disciplines and realizations together in a way that we’re able to … create these broadly applicable general comments about the world around us and … humanity,” Ramsey said.

The coexistence of hyperspecialization and broad applicability can be seen throughout Ramsey’s projects. While the fundamental techniques of architecture are very precise, they’re fluid in the sense that they transfer to a variety of problems.

The Lowline — an underground park being built in the Lower East Side of New York City — utilizes the design of a Cassegrain telescope to relocate solar energy by transporting it underground. This technology can then be used to grow subterranean vegetation.

“I thought the incorporation of different timescales; human, geolical, cosmological was really interesting,” Anna Lenaker, ENV ’24 told the News. “And I really enjoy thinking about nature as something that consumes human structures.”

During the question and answer portion of the talk, many questions pertained to the potential for the Lowline technology to make advancements in counteracting climate change.

Charnice Hoegnifioh ’24 had thoughts on how such technology could also contribute to concerns regarding food security.

“Seeing how a major part of … his experimentation was testing out … different species of plants, it made me wonder if … there could be other applications of redirecting [concentrated] sunlight from outside to create underground or subterranean … farms and agricultural centers that can be used to really bolster the world’s food supply,” Hoegnifioh said.

Ramsey’s experience and expertise in seemingly disparate disciplines — physics and architecture — epitomizes the mission of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities as stated on their website: “To foster communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines.”

“It’s important to hold on to and maintain all of your kooky, disparate interests and curiosities that you have and not think of them in a totally pragmatic way,” Ramsey says, “The more you can grow your base of knowledge and your understanding of disparate fields, the broader the palette is that you can then bring into solve problems … in any field — design or otherwise.”

FULL LETTER:

To world leaders:

We are artists, musicians, actors, performers, poets, filmmakers, dancers, writers, and creators. We are storytellers and dreamers. We are messengers of emotion and amplifiers of hope. And we are adding our voices - loud, clear, unrelenting - to the global call for a Fossil Fuel Treaty.

Because our world - our home and our muse - is on fire. From soaring temperatures to flooded cities, from poisoned air to displaced communities, the climate crisis is not a distant warning. It is a present catastrophe.

The science is clear: fossil fuel production lies at the heart of these cascading crises. Phasing out coal, oil and gas production fast and fairly is the only way to save ourselves from this destruction.

Oil, gas and coal are not just energy sources. When extracted from the ground, where they belong, they become weapons of mass destruction, destabilizing our climate, endangering our lives, and silencing entire cultures. They are suffocating the very world that inspires our art. And yet, governments continue to fund them, expand them, and delay the bold action we so desperately need.

We say: no more fossil fueled disasters. We cannot create against a backdrop of destruction. We cannot just perform while the planet burns. We refuse to let beauty fade in the name of profit. We call for a world where music can be played under open skies, where paintings are not washed away by floods, where stages, galleries and studios are filled with life, not smoke, not sorrow, not fear.

The Fossil Fuel Treaty offers a path forward; a bold, coordinated global plan to end fossil fuel expansion, phase out existing production in an equitable manner, and invest in a just and sustainable future. This is not an abstract demand. It is a lifeline to safeguard our planet as well as our ability to shape it, to sing it, and to reinvent it with our hands, voices and souls. We commend the growing bloc of governments leading this bold effort, and call on other world leaders to join them.

We, as artists from diverse disciplines and regions, are united by a shared purpose: to protect the beauty, the life and the love that inspire our work. Just as our art is rooted in creativity and expression, our response to the climate crisis must be grounded in science, justice, and on the urgent need to take action.

So we call on every artist - whether you paint murals or create melodies, write novels or scripts, perform on stage or in the streets - to use your voice, your art, and your platform to shake the world awake by joining the call for a Fossil Fuel treaty. A fossil-free world powered by sun, wind, justice and collective will is a world where art can flourish, where cultures can thrive, and where we can keep singing, dancing, and dreaming freely together.

We believe in a world where the only thing burning is passion. Where the only thing spilling is love. Where the only thing rising is the chorus of those bold enough to demand better.

This is a call to save humanity and the stories we have yet to tell. Let’s make history, not just through our canvases or lyrics, but through our collective power.

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By Paul Hockenos

Home and commercial solar arrays provide nearly a fifth of Australia’s electricity generation, with panels atop one in every three homes. To extend those panels’ usefulness, owners are increasingly buying home batteries not only to store their power for later use, but to sell electrons to the grid at times of high demand. The arrangement enables grid operators to more effectively manage the mismatch between midday solar generation and real-time consumer demand, a process known as balancing. It also lowers market energy prices because utilities that draw on batteries can avoid building expensive new power plants and power lines.

Australia laid the groundwork for this transformation last year by offering homeowners and small businesses a 30 percent discount on residential batteries, which resulted in 430,000 battery installations in less than a year, three times more than expected. A recent expansion of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program is expected to boost the number of installations to more than 2 million by 2030. If they agree to install a smart meter, battery owners can sell energy to the grid and put cash in their pockets: between $80 and $1,600 a year, depending on how the program is structured.

In a dozen other countries, mostly in Europe and North America, grid operators are writing checks to homeowners for the right to lease their batteries. “We’re moving toward a world where homes don’t just consume energy — they store it, optimize it, and contribute back to the grid,” says Joe Frodsham of the Texas-based energy storage manufacturer Renon Power. A critical mass of home batteries scattered across a region and networked together through so-called virtual power plants, or VPPs, he says, marks “the shift from energy storage as backup to energy storage as an active grid asset.”

Last year, the amount of U.S. home battery capacity enlisted in virtual power plants grew by 153 percent. Unlike a net metering system, which sends unused energy from rooftop solar panels directly into the grid in return for an energy credit, a VPP requires a storage system and software that tells the battery to send energy to the grid when it needs more power, like on a hot summer day. Compensation for tapping a homeowner’s battery is paid by either a local utility or a VPP program, of which there are now more than 500 in the U.S. and thousands in Europe.

This rapid expansion of home batteries and advanced software that aggregates thousands of decentralized energy sources is “transforming not only the way electricity is generated, but also how it is traded, delivered, and consumed,” concludes a 2022 International Energy Agency report. These assets, the report said, “can provide valuable services to the grid when incentivized with appropriate technologies, policies, and regulations.”

Currently, fewer than 10 percent of Australian homeowners who have solar arrays have signed contracts with energy providers. But experts believe the model has immense potential to expand, thanks to a global “battery revolution” that has, in a matter of years, seen battery prices plummet and their storage capacity shoot up even as their size has shrunk. Today, a 10 kilowatt-hour unit — which can simultaneously run a few household appliances and some lighting and electronics for 24 hours — can snugly fit under a staircase or into a garage corner. Between 2010 and 2020, battery density increased by more than 700 percent, and between 2010 and 2023, the price of lithium-ion batteries plunged from about $1,400 per kilowatt-hour to less than $140 per kilowatt-hour — one of the fastest cost declines of any energy technology in history.

Climate experts hope that grids can be cheaply and effectively balanced by hundreds of thousands of batteries distributed across cities, suburbs, and rural areas — some in electric vehicles, others on the walls of garages or cellars, and some in utility-scale storage parks, which still provide the lion’s share of solar-energy storage everywhere in the world. Ideally, aggregating the capacity of decentralized batteries — whether they are charged by solar panels or directly through the grid during off-peak hours — will replace dirty gas peaker plants.

Large battery projects, says a May report from the energy think tank Ember, “are increasingly cost-competitive and faster to build than new gas power plants.” And their carbon footprint is about 87 percent smaller than an average-size gas peaker. Home batteries offer similar advantages. When home battery systems are programmed to charge during times of high renewable output and discharge during peak grid demand, studies show they can reduce average household emissions by 2.2 to 6.4 percent.

Last year, the amount of U.S. home battery capacity enlisted in virtual power plants grew by 153 percent.

Programs in Puerto Rico and California that paid homeowners for their stored energy were a “key driver of the growth,” according to policy and research analyst Madeline Turner of San Diego-based Ohm Analytics. California’s VPP program, according to Canary Media, “has shown that its fleet of home batteries can be relied on much like a traditional power plant.” During a two-hour test last July, roughly 100,000 home batteries delivered about 539 megawatts of energy — more than the output of a large gas peaker plant.

In the U.S., an installed 10 kilowatt-hour system costs roughly $8,000 to $13,000. A 30-percent federal clean energy credit ended in 2025, although customers can still benefit until 2027 from tax incentives by leasing a battery system from a commercial solar or battery company. California offers an additional baseline rebate of around $150 per kilowatt-hour.

In Puerto Rico, which has a particularly rickety power grid, 70,000 home batteries are helping to reduce the risk of blackouts.

Residential storage markets function differently from country to country, and in the U.S. from state to state, as do their payment schemes. In Germany this spring, Octopus Energy’s PowerDrive bundle began providing customers with a smart meter and an EV charger that enables electricity to flow in two directions, allowing it to manage its customers’ EV charging in exchange for up to 10,000 free miles of driving, plus an annual bonus of up to $409 if the EV is plugged in, at home, for 300 or more hours. Octopus makes money selling the power stored in customers’ EVs when demand peaks and prices spike. The nation’s EV ownership rate is just under 3 percent, though, so the total impact of vehicle-to-grid technology is quite small.

Since 2022, the U.K. has had a system that pays homeowners for reducing demand when the grid is stressed — whether by high demand or a lack of wind, which provides about 30 percent of the U.K.’s total electricity generation. Battery owners have the advantage of being able to rely on their batteries during these periods. In Puerto Rico, which has a particularly rickety power grid, some 70,000 home batteries are helping to reduce the risk of blackouts, according to the grid operator.

Germany’s largest VPP is Statkraft, whose software links a multitude of decentralized energy resources including a few large fossil-fueled power plants, biogas and hydroelectric plants, thousands of solar and wind farms, and thousands more residential and commercial batteries. It markets its tidy bundles of energy on short-term European power exchanges.

With the growing demand for power, and long waits for grid connections, utilities are prepared to pay storage owners for the right to lease their batteries. But because the demand for and price of energy on a macro scale is different than the needs of a single household, most VPPs won’t optimize price fluctuations to benefit a household budget. Rather, they will optimize those fluctuations to benefit their own business model. A homeowner may prefer to charge their battery overnight, when the price of power drops, and discharge it in the late afternoon, when prices surge. But a VPP will charge and discharge the battery as needed to balance the grid — even if prices are unfavorable to the homeowner.

The primary drawbacks of joining a VPP, says Toby Couture of E3 Analytics, a Berlin-based energy think tank, are the household’s loss of control over when and how much power a third party can call upon (though most plans allow battery owners to set a reserve level), uncertain financial returns, and some additional wear and tear on the battery from extra cycling. A 2025 study found that EVs enrolled in a VPP program degraded 9 to 14 percent faster over a 10-year period. Another drawback is the high purchase price of home batteries, although some countries and several U.S. states offer subsidies.

Australia’s policies, which have reduced regulatory hurdles and challenges to integrating residential power, have made it the frontrunner in bidirectional storage, and similar policies in other countries could propel the clean energy transition forward. Where two-way battery storage makes financial sense to grid operators and battery owners, whether large or small, virtual power plants will likely expand in places where regulatory conditions allow, experts say. This is the logic of a battery revolution that is just beginning to transform our electricity markets.

ABSTRACT:

ISBN: 978-981-16-5787-0

Full text is available at Z-Library.

This book draws on posthumanist critique and post qualitative approaches to research to examine the pedagogies offered by imaginaries of the future. Starting with the question of how education can be a process for imagining and desiring better futures that can shorten the Anthropocene, it speaks to concerns that are relevant to the fields of education, youth and futures studies. This book explores lessons from the imaginaries of apocalypse, revolution and utopia, drawing on research from youth(ful) perspectives in a context when the narrative of ‘youth despair’ about the future is becoming persistent. It investigates how the imaginary of 'Apocalypse' acts as a frame of intelligibility, a way of making sense of the monstrosities of the present and also instigates desires to act in different ways. Studying the School Climate Strikes of 2019 as 'Revolution' moves us away from the teleologies of capitalist consumption and endless growth to newer aesthetics. The strikes function as a public pedagogy that creates new publics that include life beyond the human. Finally, the book explores how the Utopias of Afrofuturist fiction provides us with a kind of 'investable' utopia because the starting point is in racial, economic and ecological injustice. If the Apocalypse teaches us to recognize what needs to go, and Revolution accepts that living with ‘less than’ is necessary, then this kind of Utopia shows us how becoming ‘more than’ human may be the future. “It would be easy to despair about the purpose of education in these times. Pedagogies of the Post-anthropocene offers instead a strong case for its continued relevance. Through three imaginaries: Apocalypse, Revolution, and Utopia Esther Priyadharshini declares that worrying about the future is not enough; students need strategies and skills for a future of different politics and rights. Using empirical research and case study projects into speculative narratives across the three imaginaries, Priyadharshini offers workable ideas for using pedagogies of possibility by teachers committed to preparing students for the futures young people imagine and desire.” — Associate Professor Linda Knight, Director, Mapping Future Imaginaries research network, RMIT University, Australia “In this clearly written and engaging book, Priyadharshini draws our attention to the work of images of apocalypse, revolution and utopia in young people’s thinking and to the challenges and resources that these offer to education. It is a timely and compelling account that merits close reading by anyone interested in the relationship between education and the challenging futures we are facing today. Both theoretically robust and empirically grounded, weaving together young people’s voices, current affairs and literature, the book also opens up lines of inquiry and practice for teaching. Highly recommended.” — Keri Facer, Professor of Educational & Social Futures, University of Bristol.

cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/51670982

FULL ARTICLE:

By Susan Cosier

Five small islands roughly the size of backyard swimming pools float next to the concrete riverbank of Bubbly Creek, a stretch of the Chicago River named for the gas that once rose to the surface after stockyards dumped animal waste and byproducts into the waterway. Clumps of short, native grasses and plants, including sedges, swamp milkweed, and queen of the prairie, rise from a gravel-like material spread across each artificial island’s surface. A few rectangles cut from their middles hold bottomless baskets, structures that will, project designers hope, provide an attachment surface for freshwater mussels that once flourished in the river.

Three thousand square feet in total, these artificial wetlands are part of an effort to clean up a portion of a river that has long served the interests of industry. This floating wetland project is one of many proliferating around the world as cities increasingly look to green infrastructure to address toxic legacies. In the United States, researchers are conducting experiments in Boston and Baltimore as well as in Chicago, each team sharing best practices with the other to maximize the ecological benefits of their systems. The Canadian government and local municipalities are allotting more funding for innovative projects. Floating wetlands are also multiplying in the United Kingdom, and studies to quantify additional benefits continue in Australia and Brazil.

Floating wetlands filter contaminants and take up excess agricultural nutrients that can lead to algal blooms and dead zones.

Like natural wetlands, floating versions provide a range of ecosystem services. They filter sediment and contaminants from stormwater, and laboratory experiments show that some plants have the ability to lock up some chemicals and metals found in acid mine drainage. These systems take up excess agricultural nutrients that can lead to algal blooms and dead zones, and recent research suggests they could be used to reduce manmade contaminants that persist in the environment. Though it’s difficult to quantify the exact benefits these systems offer, and they have limitations as a tool in remediating polluted waterways, they could provide another option, researchers say.

Nick Wesley, executive director of Urban Rivers, a nonprofit working with the Shedd Aquarium on the Chicago project, believes floating systems are a natural fit for the urban environment. Many urbanized river systems, he says, have the same “steel sheet pile wall, some rough-wrap riprap on the edges. We’re trying to [restore] what the naturalized river would be.” In many cities, he continues, floating wetlands could provide a low-cost alternative to conventional infrastructure projects because they’re modular and easy to install and to monitor.

Wesley’s group began, in 2018, with a floating wetlands project on the Chicago River’s North Branch. Called the Wild Mile, the installation aims to improve water quality and has already begun attracting invertebrates, including mollusks and crustaceans. Last month, the group expanded to the shores of Bubbly Creek. Urban Rivers, Shedd employees, and a team of volunteers bolted together polyethylene and metal frames, draped them with matting, dropped them in the water, added plants, and anchored the islands to the river bottom so they stay in place as the roots grow into the water. The plants will grow for years to come, part of a “riverponic” system, as Wesley calls it, that requires no soil or other substrate for support.

Floating wetlands “are having a bit of a moment,” says Richard Grosshans, a research scientist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development who works on the floating structures. “They function very similarly to a natural wetland: they have the same processes, plants and microorganisms, bacteria and algae, [which] naturally break down toxins. They take up nutrients and provide habitat. It’s kind of common sense to those of us who work with these types of systems.”

Floating wetlands were first tested in retention ponds, the kind often located near developments to hold stormwater, to see if they filtered pollution. “The front end of it was, ‘Will they work? How well do they work? And what plants should we recommend?’” says Sarah White, an environmental toxicologist and horticulturalist at Clemson University who has worked on floating wetlands since 2006. Partnering with researchers at Virginia Tech, White found that the wetland plants she tested not only did well in ponds with lots of nutrient pollution, but the adaptable, resilient plants actually thrived. She did not always choose native plants, opting instead for those that would make the islands more attractive, so that more urban planners would use them.

In the early 2010s, Chris Walker, a researcher at the University of South Australia, began testing floating wetlands in wastewater, quantifying the pollutants that four species of plants took up in their tissues and improvements to water quality. Two species, twig rush Baumea articulata and the common reed Phragmites australis, showed the highest uptake of nitrogen and phosphorus of any floating wetland research to date. “That creates a real opportunity for [the] permanent removal of sequestered nutrients,” says Walker, who is also the principal scientist for a floating wetland company called Clarity Aquatic.

One acre of floating wetland can absorb the nutrient pollution from seven to 15 acres of urban development, one researcher found.

His team also started testing the ability of floating wetlands to filter out emerging contaminants like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are not always filtered by treatment plants and are linked to elevated cholesterol levels, problems with reproductive health, and kidney and testicular cancers. The reed Phragmites australis placed in a floating wetland began absorbing the pollutant into its tissues in less than a month.

Islands anchored in cities are giving scientists an opportunity to study environments that have long been ignored. In Chicago, Austin Happel, a research biologist at the Shedd Aquarium, is beginning a study on fish near the floating wetlands in Bubbly Creek. Starting in the spring, he’ll use acoustic telemetry to tag fish captured near the wetland and monitor where they go. By the following year, he should be able to see if they use the floating wetlands as a buffet or as a place to hide from predators.

In Boston, Max Rome, a PhD student at Northeastern University, is attempting to quantify the benefits of wetlands that have been floating since 2020 in the Charles River, another historically degraded waterway. He found that one acre of wetland can absorb the nutrient pollution — usually dumped into the river via stormwater — from seven to 15 acres of dense urban development.

Rome is also looking into whether floating wetlands can create small pockets of improved water quality or habitat that allow certain native species, like freshwater sponges, to regain a toehold in the river. To do that, he monitored water quality near the wetlands and compared it to other places in the river.

“The last generation did a really good job of dealing with point source pollution — and it was a huge task,” he says, referring to the success of the Clean Water Act in reducing effluent from discharge pipes. His generation has a new job, he adds: grappling with “ecological restoration of these degraded water bodies at the same time that we do pollution reduction,” something the wetlands could help address.

Despite the benefits of floating wetlands, obstacles to widespread adoption remain. They require time and energy to install and monitor, and they could potentially cause flooding if they become unmoored and interfere with water flow. A city would also need hundreds of floating wetlands to clean up the most polluted stretches of waterways and manage the contaminants that continue to flow into them.

Another potential drawback is the threat of invasive plants colonizing a floating wetland, which would then require maintenance. One species that effectively sucked up PFAS in the Australian study, for example, is an aggressive invader already colonizing wetlands across the U.S. In addition, if the goal of a floating wetland is to permanently remove phosphorous and nitrogen from an ecosystem, managers may need to remove and compost plants so they don’t release the nutrients back into the environment when they go dormant, though ongoing research suggests that biofilms that form on plant roots and on the bottom of wetlands could continue to remove nutrients even after plants start to senesce. Plants that remove PFAS would likely need to be incinerated.

The National Aquarium in Baltimore is planning to expand its 400-square-foot floating wetland to 10,000 square feet by 2024.

Still, say researchers, floating wetlands do benefit the environment. “I think we’re just looking for one more tool in our toolbox to help manage water quality,” says Clemson’s White. “This gives us another place in the landscape where we can actually have a technology that will do it.”

The types of places that could be improved by these projects are growing more varied. The National Aquarium in Baltimore was the first place in the U.S. to test floating wetlands in a tidal system, and today 400 square feet planted in saltmeadow hay and smooth cordgrass float in the city’s Inner Harbor. The project has been so successful at lowering levels of nutrients and bacteria and at creating a refuge for wildlife — including American eels, gizzard shad, and ghost anemones — that the aquarium now plans to expand the islands to 10,000 square feet in 2024, says Charmaine Dahlenburg, the aquarium’s director of field conservation.

The Harbor islands are the National Aquarium’s fourth attempt at creating a thriving wetland system, demonstrating how difficult it can be to tailor a floating wetland to a specific location. When the aquarium first installed wetlands in 2010, geese invaded them and ate the plants. A similar problem occurred with a second version two years later. The third attempt fared better, thanks to fencing that excluded geese, but the fourth iteration — which incorporates a channel that prevents algal blooms from killing plants — fared the best.

National Aquarium researchers investigating how the floating wetlands help mitigate such blooms found that microscopic organisms on plant roots and on the bottom of the wetlands help move nitrogen from the water and through the food chain — from barnacle to crab to fish. There are ecosystem benefits above the waterline, too: Night herons and otters visit the islands, finding refuge in the grasses. Research on fish, birds, and mammals attracted to floating wetlands is not well developed, but these structures clearly provide habitat in places where buildings, bulkheads, and riprap have replaced natural wetlands.

The amount of contamination that plants can remove from aquatic environments depends on the amount and type of pollution, the plant species used, and the size of the floating wetlands. But some scientists, including Dahlenburg and Rome, are hoping that as research accumulates, government agencies will consider using such projects to mitigate contamination and wetland development.

In three Boston-area watersheds, a new regulation under the Clean Water Act will require certain commercial, industrial, and institutional properties with one or more acres of impervious surface to reduce nutrient and bacterial pollution in stormwater running off their properties, something never mandated before. Britain recently announced a requirement for homes and water companies to reduce water pollution. Floating wetlands that do that are already growing in London, and plans for other locations are in the works.

Regulations like these could compel cities to take a more aggressive approach to green stormwater infrastructure. “As that begins to happen,” says Rome, “the role that can be played by floating treatment wetlands is going to come into focus.”

The growing use of the buoyant, lush gardens — in cities that range from Australia to Europe to North America — show how even small wetland islands can make a difference. “Our little postage stamp of a wetland isn’t going to solve everything,” says Dahlenburg, of the Baltimore project. “What we’re trying to create is this model urban waterfront. We want other cities to know that there are ways to incorporate natural habitat, to bring back the ecosystem services that were lost because of industrial development.”