Slashdot Mirror
Reduce CO2 With Phytoplankton Seeding
JediJeremy writes "Nature has this article on a team of scientists who want to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by increasing the amount of phytoplankton in the oceans. Phytoplankton thrive on iron, so the scientists are going to conduct a study to better grap the affect of an increase of iron in the water will be. They plan to dissolve an iron sulphate solution in a 150-200 square-kilometer patch of the Southern Ocean, near Antarctica to maximize the containment of the iron. The major flaw in the plan is it will only work if the phytoplankton die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking the CO2 with them, otherwise, the carbon will be reintroduced into the ecosystem. Interesting idea, but big design flaw."
Unless there's some kind of magic alchemy going on, there isn't any more carbon on Earth now than there was a billion years ago. Not much of a design flaw in that respect.
But at the very least it would be putting it go good use: Plankton feeds fish, humans eat fish. Can't be all bad...
On the other hand, you could conceivably harvest the plankton and turn it into fuel of some kind, or stuff it in an abandoned mine like they're trying to do with gaseous CO2 already.
=SMidge=
Dear Human Infestation,
Due to your short lifespans and typically self-centered insights, you may not have noticed that I've been decreasing CO2 levels through 'carbon sequestration,' as you call it, for many many millions of years. You may also note that grasses have evolved to take advantage of this. I can only assume you didn't catch the GNN broadcast notifying the rest of the galaxy of my on-going change from forest to steppe.
Please refrain from terraforming efforts until you have at least the vaguest idea of what you are doing. Thank you for your attention.
Scincerly,
The Management.
We've got lots of worms...and phytoplankton...
...they should combine this 'seeding the ocean with iron' with eliminating SUV's.
;)
This is how you do it: You build giant wood chippers with the ejection shoots aimed out over the ocean.
Then line up all the SUV's in the USA and make people drive them into the chippers.
The steel from the SUV's will shoot out and fertilize the plankton.
To be humane you can let the drivers jump out at the last minute. Unless they're too busy talking on their cell phones to jump.
Hey, I'm sure the plankton could do with elements other than iron for fertilizer.
Smetacek and 48 colleagues... will monitor the growth of phytoplankton from a helicopter...for a period of eight to ten weeks.
(49 scientists + boat + chopper) * 10 weeks = enough CO2 to give all these newly spawned (hatched? divided?) planktons serious eating disorders.
Why do you have to come down here and tip all that FeSO4 in my backyard? What, Baltic wasn't big enough? Too shallow? No happy snaps with penguins?
And if they don't float... well, then you haven't really lost anything, have you?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Anyone know if something like this has already been done? Gee, I don't know... photoplankton has been dying for hundreds of millions of year now. If it wasn't sinking, I'd expect to see some floating islands of dead photoplankton by now. On the other hand, if had been sinking to the bottom of the sea, I'd expect to see limestone deposits by now. Why don't you take a quick survey, and tell me which you see more of. (hint: what are the white cliffs of Dover made out of?)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
National Geographic just did an article about the Carbon Cycle in their February issue. They stated that this has been tried, but it's been found that most phytoplakton die and decay on the surface without falling to the ocean bottom.
The previous responder's link identifies "abandoned mine shafts" as one of the several possibilities, but I suppose those mines would have to be very deep and have few fractures, else the CO2 would leak right out again.
FWIW, one of the advantages of using "spent" oil wells is that you can't recover all of the oil just by pumping. CO2 is a nice non-polar solvent and it dissolves the remaining oil stuck in the pores of the rock, so you can circulate it and boil off the CO2 from the stuff you bring back up, leaving oil as the bottoms. This might not be economical to do for its own sake, but if you are already paying for the CO2 disposal the oil recovery would be icing on the cake.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Thus endeth the grammar lesson for the day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I recall that one such iron-seeding experiment was done in the tropics. One would almost expect the results to be different in the arctic, because cold arctic waters are where the coldest deep-ocean water is formed. If that water is sinking, it seems likely that it would tend to take dead algae with it. (On the other hand, the fact that many Antarctic waters are relatively fertile suggests that there are upwelling currents there which account for the productivity. Perhaps the area being seeded is a downwelling zone... this is not detailed in the article either.)
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yes, iron fertilization actually is an idea about 20 years old. "with half a shipload of iron ...I could give you an ice age"
As the Nature article mentions, smaller experiments have been done. The major question is whether animals might eat all the additional plants. Although if there are then more animals, more of their bones will also be falling to the ocean bottom eventually.
Ways to work around such problems include pulsing the growth. Feed one area enough to increase plant growth, but little enough that the iron will run out soon so that temporary ecology will collapse and more dead things will sink to the ocean bottom.
stop breathing ^_^
Have a nice day!
The theory was tested by some scientists near the antarctic and while it worked a little the cost of actually doing it is prohibitive. This does not take into account the affect creating billions more of the wee beasites would have on the marine life cycly. Hell the person who first discovered the photopankton advised against this method of using them because of the way negative effects it could have (like feeding alge growth that kills fish). Check out the latest issues of Discover and Scientific Amerian for the lowdown.
This has been looked at before (as stated in the article) but only on a much smaller scale. The difference with this project is that they intend to cover a larger area and to watch it for a longer period of time. However, a couple of months will not be long enough to truly judge what sort of side-effects this method may generate.
There is the question of whether the phytoplankton will fall to the ocean bottom and actually remove the CO2 from the system, but this is really less of an issue, I think, because there are many "outs" that the carbon can take to actually fall to the ocean floor. At every step in the food chain things die and float to the bottom or are consumed and excreted and float to the bottom. the general theory is that X% of the biomass will always fall to the ocean floor. If you increase the biomass by a factor of Y, you should see a y-fold increase in flocculation of carbon.
Other questions to consider are what will the effect of an iron enrichment be to other life forms in the same waters? Will the FeSO4 level be toxic to zooplankton or to certain species of fish? Without careful consideration, this process could have devastating effects.
Fortunately, they are practicing good science in that they are testing their theories on (relatively) small scales before beginning a full regimen of iron enrichment to combat a growing problem. This will not solve our problems by any means. It is merely to stem the tide so that better environmental practices can be realized.
I wonder what's wrong this idea:
1. Grow trees, grass and stuff
2. Cut the grown trees, grass and stuff
3. Bury the cut down trees grass and stuff
Keep doing this at same scale as we use fossil fuels, and make oil companies to pay for it (and add it to the price of fossil fuels). For extra value, turn trees into paper, use it, then bury the scrap paper.
Now there must be something seriously wrong with this, since I haven't seen this suggested anywhere. Is it sheer scale, us using far more fossil fuels than we can practically grow and harvest plants for burial?
This was done almost step for step in one of the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. I think it was in either Green Mars or Blue Mars but folks back on Earth were dumping iron dust into the ocean off of Antarctica to boost the plankton population to act as carbon fixers. He presented it basicaly as terraforming on Earth.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Wired ran an article in 2000 about other groups who were using the same method to the same purpose. It's quite a bit longer and more detailed, giving a more complete picture of how it's intended to work.
If critters eat the phtyoplankton then they carry the CO2 and keep some it circulating within the ecosystem. More critters that live and eat the phytoplankton and critters that eat the phytoplankton increase the holding capacity of the CO2.
Yes, some will be released back but the critters become CO2 holding containers. The more biomass of critters available, the more can be held.
Waste, detritus and dead critters that fall to the bottom of the ocean will carry some CO2 to the depths but the key is to increase the biomass available to eat the phytoP and those tho eat the phytoP.
In short, this should also be very good for increasing fish populations. Free food. Nummy.
Yes, I was a Marine Bio Major.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Why cann't those plants convert CO2 to O2 + C?
What is wrong with this plan? Just grow a lot of plants or the same plankton and we'll have no CO2 problem.
I guess the increased acidic rain, not only causing your local water supply to become more toxic (increased heavy metal content (like copper, which is toxic and mercury etc..), an article recently on the BBC's web site stated that the oceans are getting more acidic....okay, I guess that's going to really screw up the planet and make the earth uninhabital...and most of the twits in power are fussing about WMD?
- If the area is dry, there is nothing to keep the CO2 from just seeping up through the soil.
- If the area is wet, there is nothing to keep the CO2 from dissolving in the groundwater and percolating to a place where it can seep up through the soil, seep into springs or streams where it can bubble off, etc.
That said, I've read that there have been enough experiments with the pumping of "sour gas" (containing H2S) into deep disposal without any obvious leaks (and they WOULD be obvious) that we can be certain that many of these things would work as proposed.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
And, yes, those crop forests grown by paper mills do produce a lot of paper products. Some ends up sequestered in landfills. Some is incinerated (and trapped ash is sequestered). Some is composted and some carbon trapped in soil which feeds plants (more carbon fixing).
Of course, if methods such as thermal depolymerization become popular, then paper and anything else with carbon in it can get converted to fuel or plastics. Fuel would release carbon back to the atmosphere (unless that exhaust is being fed into a depolymerization plant so the carbon dioxide is recombined with hydrogen and oxygen to produce more fuel and plastic).
And plastics are just a soft rock which decomposes quite slowly, so buried plastic can be considered as another sequestration method.