Odlin confirms that Running Tide couldn’t monitor the wood-chip ocean deposits for more than three hours after their release. He stated, “We couldn’t measure signal from noise in the ocean on the alkalinity.”
The Dead Zone
Even after selling credits to Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Running Tide faced mounting financial pressure as funding from Silicon Valley dwindled. A former employee recalled that in spring 2024, Odlin would kick off meetings by revealing the company had only a few weeks of funds left before it might have to shut down. By June, Odlin acknowledged defeat.
In a LinkedIn post dated June 14, 2024, Odlin wrote, “there simply isn’t the demand needed to support large-scale carbon removal.” The company halted global operations that month, leading to sudden layoffs for nearly all employees in Iceland and the US. One employee learned about the closure while presenting on behalf of Running Tide at an algae conference.
“People were happy with our credits. We were fulfilling our contracts and selling additional ones. It just wasn’t enough,” Odlin explained. Running Tide had generated $30 million in sales and had commitments for tens of millions more. However, Odlin estimated the company needed between $100 million and $150 million in sales to sustain itself. “That was, like, the rent we were designed for.”
The long-term impact of the company’s wood-chip dumping remains uncertain. Scientists and deep-sea experts consulted by WIRED express caution about pursuing such marine geoengineering until more is understood about the deep sea.
A pile of wood chips left by Running Tide at Grundartangi, filmed in October 2024.
Video: Alexandra Talty
Samantha Joye, a Regents’ Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia, warns that dumping biomass in the ocean could create “dead zones,” areas where aquatic life lacks oxygen. Joye has worked on dead zones in the Mississippi Delta and helped with the cleanup of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She noted that deep-sea environments—some of which yield life-saving drugs or insights into early Earth—could suffer lasting damage.
A recent carbon flux report by Convex Seascape Survey, an international research collaboration, highlighted that disturbing the seabed could disrupt the sediments’ ability to absorb carbon. Joye further cautioned that without adequate research, attempts to enhance ocean alkalinity could inadvertently raise ocean acidity if carbon is drawn into the sea without being distributed properly into deeper waters—the opposite of what the treated wood chips aimed to achieve.
