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Hungry Crustaceans Eat Climate Change Experiment
Earlier this month, an expedition fertilized 300 square kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean with six metric tons of dissolved iron. This triggered a bloom of phytoplankton, which doubled their biomass within two weeks by taking in carbon dioxide from the seawater. The dead phytoplankton were then expected to sink to the ocean bed, dragging carbon along with them. Instead, the experiment turned into an example of how the food chain works, as the bloom was eaten by a swarm of hungry copepods. The huge swarm of copepods were in turn eaten by larger crustaceans called amphipods, which are often eaten by squid and whales. "I think we are seeing the last gasps of ocean iron fertilization as a carbon storage strategy," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University. While the experiment failed to show ocean fertilization as a viable carbon storage strategy, it has pushed the old "My dog ate my homework" excuse to an unprecedented level.
The copepods ate my project. Try that one on your thesis advisor....
Still and all, that's why they do experiments. Sometimes you learn something.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's hard to believe nobody saw this coming. Hey, let's create a massive amount of food in the ocean and let it sink to the bottom. Did they think the ocean dwellers were just going to let it be for the sake of science or something?
I don't know, it sounds kinda stupid to me.
"Mom, I want to see how dog food reacts to the sun, so I'm going to fill Sparky's bowl and let it sit for a week."
Next day. "Mom, Sparky ate the dog food." Duh? :)
Let them die of natural causes.
First, it looks to me like the experiment broke for the same reason that earlier experiments had. Once you seed sea water with enough iron, the growing algae eventually consumes available silica. The algae observed in the experiment were less silica-rich (ie, they weren't diatoms) and hence easier to feed upon. Having to add silica makes the logistics much harder, since you need considerable quantities of silica. Second, heavy grazing doesn't imply that the researchers failed in their goal of creating a carbon sink. Not all of the food chain would have been eaten by higher up. Probably a lot of those algae and animals ended up on the sea bed floor. The problem though is that you can't then estimate well how much carbon was deposited on the ocean floor. In other words, the experiment might have worked anyway to lock away a considerable amount of CO2, but as is, it can't be used as a consistent carbon sink in a human carbon management program.
Third, grazing is going to be a fundamental problem unless somehow plankton is seperated from the algae. I bet there is plankton that will eat diatoms too. The grazer problem will affect any program that attempts to carbon sink via ocean grown algae blooms.
The experiment was a success. It proved that their theory was invalid within the constraints and parameters that were defined.
Had the experiment failed to show a definitive determination as to the validity of the theory or if some external force altered the parameters beyond the theory's limits, then you could say that the experiment failed.
Just because the results of the experiment were not what you expected, does not mean that the experiment failed.
Think of it as the difference between searching for a theory that is back up by data, and searching for data that backs up your theory. One is scientific, the other is pharmaceutical.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
If we assume that an animal stores in its body all of the CO2 from plants it eats throughout its lifetime, then I suppose so...
Diatoms have been the limiting factor in ocean fertilization recentlly, fears you will throw off the ecosystem by proliferating potentially harmful diatoms. The fact that this wasn't found is a success! Organisms will eat the plankton...no surprise. However, that doesn't mean its a failure! Fish are not 100% efficient at using all organic mater from the food they eat. Anywhere from ~30- 50% of the small percent of the plankton that is eaten is still going to be released as ORGANIC waste which will then fall to the bottom of the ocean sequestering carbon.
This is like being against tree planting because it encourages bugs to come eat the leaves, birds to eat the bugs, and bacteria that eat the dead leaves
In ocean seeding theory, it would not be done in areas where there are many fish around to eat the plankton. The idea is to seed 'dead' areas of the tropic ocean where fish typically avoid because of its lack of iron. I believe in practice the idea is to seed very large areas of the ocean with less intensity than this experiment. I.E slowly release Fe off the back of shipping vessels for 100's of miles Regardless, i believe an externality of this is potentially treating some of the effects of overfishing.
Encouraging the ocean to absorb CO2 (NOT HYDROCARBONS!!) boosts its acidity. Unless someone has a reference on this, their suggestion is entirely wrong. The article they reference does not mention anything about this! Yes, CO2 increases in the ocean lead to carbonic acid and increase its acidity. But, fertilization TURNS THE CO2 into ORGANIC MATERIAL! Organic material DOES NOT INCREASE ACIDITY of the ocean, please read any book on photosynthesis.
I feel this article shows signs of some hard bias against ocean fertilization and I'm not sure why.
Yeah, that's what I try to tell my reviewers when some of my research ends up with a null result. "Even though this doesn't look like much, it's actually really important because...." :)
Actually, it is. Null results consistently going unpublished can lead to very wrong conclusions.
Additive identity, multiplicative cancellation, distributive multiplication over addition: pick any two (unless 1 = 0)