London Calling on yet another proposed "oceanic assault"
Published by MAC on 2012-08-01Source: PlanetArk
Only a matter of ironing out the fine details...
Now here's a novel idea - indeed, it might have come straight from science fiction.
Why not dump fine iron sulphates into the world's seas, stimulating algae growth, and thereby averting the massive build-up of carbon in the atmosphere - a key trigger of adverse climate change?
Actually, the concept's not that new. It's been bounced around for some time, though didn't seem to be taken very seriously until 2007.
In May that year, a leading group of scientists threw a bucket of cold water over such a plan, warning that:
"Commercial exploitation of this technique could cause substantial harm to the ocean ecosystem and may even reduce its ability to sequester carbon. Such an assault on these remote and fragile ecosystems should not be done until we can show there are demonstrable benefits that outweigh the costs." See: London Calling on a balmy (or is it barmy?) idea
Five years later, and another international scientific team claims to have shown the "technique" will work. It's urging that the current London Convention moratorium on large-scale experimentation in so-called "ocean fertilisation", be over-turned.
Time, perhaps, to re-iterate our previous comments on this issue:
"It's a brainy, or a hare-brained scheme, depending on your perspective... Just throw iron filings off a boat into the ocean depths and - hey presto! - you have a ready-made fertiliser of plankton. This will then absorb massive amounts of the carbon dioxide we're all belching out on the surface and that contributes massively to adverse climate change.
"Just how much iron would be required if the plan gets UN or governmental backing depends on the amount of ocean 'seeded'. But it's conceivable that hundreds of thousands of tonnes would come into market play - and that's a helluva prospect for mining companies.
"So, the carbon is chucked into the oceans where it gets neutralised by iron filings; big iron ore producers like [Vale], Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton then make a killing while re-affirming their efforts to reduce negative climate change. Meanwhile they can carry on churning out more and more steel, and thus contributing further to global warming.
"What the heck, if the ocean's biota may be poisoned in the process? After all, there's been submarine tailings disposal of toxic metals for decades..."
Fertilizing oceans with iron dust helps sink carbon: study
Alister Doyle
PlanetArk
23 July 2012
Dumping iron in the seas can help transfer carbon from the atmosphere and bury it on the ocean floor for centuries, helping to fight climate change, according to a study released on Wednesday.
The report, by an international team of experts, provided a boost for the disputed use of such ocean fertilization for combating global warming. But it failed to answer questions over possible damage to marine life.
When dumped into the ocean, the iron can spur growth of tiny plants that carry heat-trapping carbon to the ocean floor when they die, the study said.
Scientists dumped seven tons of iron sulphate, a vital nutrient for marine plants, into the Southern Ocean in 2004. At least half of the heat-trapping carbon in the resulting bloom of diatoms, a type of algae, sank below 1,000 meters (3,300 ft).
"Iron-fertilized diatom blooms may sequester carbon for timescales of centuries in ocean bottom water and for longer in the sediments," the team from more than a dozen nations wrote in the journal Nature.
Burying carbon in the oceans would help the fight against climate change, caused by a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists say is raising temperatures and causing more floods, mudslides, droughts and higher sea levels.
The study was the first convincing evidence that carbon, absorbed by algae, can sink to the ocean bed. One doubt about ocean fertilization has been whether the carbon stays in the upper ocean layers, where it can mix back into the air.
A dozen previous studies have shown that iron dust can help provoke blooms of algae but were inconclusive about whether it sank.
Large-scale experiments with ocean fertilization using iron are currently banned by the international London Convention on dumping at sea because of fears about side-effects.
"Crying Shame"
"I am hoping that these results will show how useful these experiments are," lead author Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany told Reuters.
"It's a crying shame, honestly," he said of the moratorium, which he said meant that even small-scale experiments were too complex and costly for researchers.
He said that ocean fertilization should be overseen by the United Nations and should not be eligible for carbon credits under U.N. treaties. He said private companies should not be allowed to run experiments so that proper oversight can be ensured.
Ocean fertilization is one of several suggested techniques for slowing climate change known as "geo-engineering". Other possibilities include reflecting sunlight with giant mirrors in space.
"Most scientists would agree that we are nowhere near the point of recommending ocean iron fertilization as a geo-engineering tool," Ken Buessler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the United States wrote in a commentary in Nature.
But he added that many thought that bigger and longer experiments were needed to see if the technology worked.
"If the 50 percent figure for algal bloom biomass sinking to the deep ocean is correct then this represents a whole new ball game in terms of iron fertilization as a geo-engineering technique," said Dave Reay, a senior lecturer in carbon management at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study.
"Maybe such deliberate enhancement of carbon storage in the oceans has more legs than we thought but, as the authors acknowledge, it's still far too early to run with it," he said.
Smetacek said the publication had been delayed since 2004 partly because of problems in checking that the 150 square km (60 square miles) patch of ocean where the iron was dumped - an eddy in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current - had not mixed with waters outside.
The experts said that the input of iron was similar to that found after the melt of icebergs in the oceans - iron concentrations in coastal regions tend to be much higher.
(Editing by Alessandra Rizzo)