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."

Comments

Earth to Scientists....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Earth to Scientists....

[SEWilco]

Well, according to some carbon budget calculations we'll run out of carbon in a few hundred thousand years. Without carbon dioxide in the air, all plants will die. Followed shortly by oxygen-using life forms. I hate when that happens.

Of course, this is a very short time in geologic time scales. Seems unlikely that it would happen now for the first time. This suggests something wrong in such a carbon budget, such as a missing carbon source or overestimated sink. The ocean bottom is one large sink for which values have been hard to calculate...and avoid the common method of "we know the budget must be in balance, so by subtracting the values for all the other sinks, the remainder is obviously the amount of carbon deposited on the ocean floor."

Re:Design flaw?

[Radical Rad]

or stuff it in an abandoned mine like they're trying to do with gaseous CO2 already.

I haven't heard about plans to store it in a mine. I have heard several times about sinking it to the bottom of the ocean. That seems like a bad idea to me though. What if something disturbed the ocean like an asteroid strike or nuclear blast? If a lot of CO2 came to the surface at once (in addition to the methane currently locked in ice) it could asphyxiate millions depending on how much was released. Similar things happen frequently in volcanic regions. A CO2 eruption in Camaroon in 1986 killed thousands of people and animals. http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Nyo s.html

To REALLY decrease the CO2...

[Ugmo]

...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. ;)

Re:Design flaw?

[El]

Actually, there is slightly more carbon on Earth than a billion years ago due to meteorite strikes, but the important thing is how much carbon is loose in the atmosphere (C02) versus how much is tied up in the crust of the Earth itself or in other forms. Lately we have been decreasing the biomass tied up in trees (thus releasing carbon into the atmosphere), and extracting and burning hydrocarbons like they are going our of style (which in fact they are). The burning of fossil fuel has a secondary affect noone talks about -- sulpher emissions forms sulphuric acid, which then rain down on limestone and erode it at a much faster rate, thus releasing even more carbon dioxide into the air. If all the photoplankton falls to the bottom of the ocean, it'll eventually form new limestone deposits, no? Perhaps it would be more effective to prevent the limestone we have now from eroding. Ok, who's going to help me spray the Himalayas with a protective sealant?

Re:Design flaw?

[Smidge204]

If you have asteroid strikes reaching the bottom of the oceans or nuclear blasts in just about any form, CO2 probably ain't your biggest problem.

Here's a reference to the abandoned mine storage concept.
=Smidge=

I didn't hear about mines, I thought it was...

[Tau Zero]

... exhausted oil and gas wells and other deep aquifers. These have the known geological stability to be able to hold gases for aeons, and a great many of them have pipes running into them already.

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.

The word is "phYtoplankton"

[Tau Zero]

The word does not derive from "photo", for light, but phyein, to bring forth via its derivative "phyton". Phytoplankton are the self-feeders, the "autotrophs"; everything else is an other-feeder, or heterotroph.

Thus endeth the grammar lesson for the day.

Old theory on a new scale

[(0d0]

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.

"Easy" global solution?

[Urkki]

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?