Iron to sequester carbon

When are we going to learn that human engineering is no match for mother nature? Unintended consequence potential abound! How have environments been altered, potentially forever, by dams, or global shipping of invasive species? The shear volume of what we don't know about how the environment is interconnected is astounding, and yet we are willing to do thingsthat we have no ideA if "solving" ozone issue won't exacerbate others!

Isn't ultimately easier to control the issue at the source(s)? Oh, I forget, we don't want to pay our costs of energy, and choose instead to think they have no cost instead. Cutting GHG emissions world wide is not gng to be easy, but ultimately it is the only solution for a planet that looks somewhat like the one we have known!

Icarus

 

Not the only such study, but apparently the most successful to date. The boats were out in 2004 and I really don't know what other experiments have been done since then.

My rough&ready summary, by no means guaranteed accurate: They achieved an iron concentration increase of 1.2 micromoles per square meter and this caused the particulate (sinkable) carbon to increase by about 1.2 moles per square meter. This is a million-fold C:Fe, but they can not determine what proportion of the carbon then sank. Some did but not the whole million.

Other nutrients than iron are required, and the success here may be related to their (carefully) selecting a patch where those others were adequate. Earlier experiments did not all go so well, and there is some evidence that plankton we don't like (toxic cyanobacteria causing red tides) get stimulated.

The link to fish needs explaining. If you suceed in getting the carbon (in the form of plankton) to sink, they do not stay in the food chain and do no give you more fishes.

If you grow more plankton and they get eaten, then you can get more fishes, but the carbon is not net removed from the atmosphere. An optimist might say that either outcome looks like a win.

If you know where and when the ocean is 'underperforming' in terms of net C trapping vs its nutrient concentrations, you would know where to add iron and possibly other chemicals. Scaling up would require such information, not yet in hand. One can imagine a next generation of Argo-type floats with abilities to measure N, P and Si.

One can imagine lotsa things. presuming money and (perhaps most importantly) the desire to know.

 

The 'article about the article'

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v487/n7407/full/487305a.html

reports an amplification of 13,000. Less than the million I said, but with the advantage of being said by a real oceanographer.

 

There are more fish in the sea than fish so to speak!

Push a balloon on one spot, and it will push it somewhere else, and with the little we know in the net about the sea, the idea of "experimenting" with it to solve our known problems is, IMHO the height of hubris!

Icarus

My previous past should have said, "solve ONE SET" instead of "ozone", whacky auto correct iPad!