Formic acid. HCOOH, or alternately, CH2O2. Could anyone, even as little as a year ago, have dreamed that this unremarkable chemical compound had the potential to save the world?
Eleanor Chen looked at the colorless liquid in the flask in her hand. She smiled, appreciating a stew of ironies that only a tree-hugger with three PhDs could get.
In the first half of the 21st century, the world had experienced a chain of falling ecological dominoes that left considerably more doubt for the survival of life on Earth than belief. Temperatures had risen, storms had gotten more intense, coastlines flooded, species died out. It had been one thing after another, each more nightmarish than the last.
And then a decade ago, the worst of it began: A worldwide collapse of phytoplankton, a simple microorganism in the Earth's oceans that formed the foundation of the seas' food chain. Ultimately, this meant oceans devoid of life. And ultimately that meant a world devoid of life.
By now, phytoplankton were barely at five percent of the levels they had been ten years earlier. For the last eight of those years, Dr. Chen had been researching this problem, and now she had found a solution. Formic acid. Mixed with seawater, formic acid miraculously reversed the decline of plankton. Chen didn't yet understand the mechanism, but the results were clear, and nothing else tried had had anywhere near this level of promise.
She thumbed through her pages of data again. Phytoplankton activity began to recover almost immediately when formic acid was first added to the large tanks used to simulate actual ocean conditions. Within six months, activity had returned to near-normal levels and stayed that way for at least the three years or so since the first trial was conducted. More recent tests in actual open ocean verified these results.
She looked through the rest of the report, reviewing data that indicated one important additional fact. It turned out that synthesized formic acid varied slightly in its chemical reactance from its natural counterpart. Only naturally occurring formic acid would react with seawater in the right way to reverse the collapse of the phytoplankton.
Natural formic acid could be distilled from the bodies of ants. In fact, the name formic acid came from the Latin formica -- ant.
Unfortunately, the last species of ant had gone extinct six years earlier.