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Iron From Antarctic Rocks Fuels Algae Growth
MTorrice writes "The Southern Ocean around Antarctica is a significant carbon dioxide sink. Phytoplankton in the ocean pull down a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Oceanographers have wondered where these photosynthetic microbes get enough iron to fuel this process. A new study (abstract) suggests that iron leached into the sea from rock weathering and bacterial activity on Antarctica may be part of the answer. Climate change could actually accelerate this iron release, leading to larger blooms of phytoplankton and more carbon dioxide uptake by the ocean, the researchers say."
http://deusex.wikia.com/wiki/Panchaea
Dystopian Future HO!
The officially stated purpose of Panchaea is to counter the effects of the global warming. In order to do so, the facility promotes growth of phytoplankton by dispersing iron into the ocean. The underlying expectation is that more carbon will be trapped in biomass and then deposited on the ocean floor as sediment.
That has to be bullshit because we know climate change is real and man made. The planet is doomed unless everyone rides their bike to work and eats rice cakes.
I'm sure it will please you to know that your straw man has helped to sequester just a bit of carbon that would otherwise have remained in the atmosphere!
The ocean acting as a buffer isn't a good thing, this causes ocean acidification which chemically attacks coral and shelled sea creatures.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Does this mean I should cancel my Prius order and go for an Escalade instead?
Trolling is a art,
It can get much worse than that since the algal bloom can also reduce oxygen levels in the water, wiping out a much larger chunk of marine ecosystems than coral and shell fish. Depending on the individual blooms, it could be a good thing and provide a respite from rising CO2, but it might also be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Also anti-buffered, eg. when the Siberian permafrost melts.
No sig today...
It's all a matter of time scale. The crust will eventually re-absorb whatever we manage to dump into the atmosphere, but it will be too late for us. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
He could be talking about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/april/prehistoric-mass-extinction-042710.html
For a while we didn't have coral.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
A short jaunt to wiki tells me what I want.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
This rate is 100 times faster than any changes in ocean acidity in the last 20 million years, making it unlikely that marine life can somehow adapt to the changes.
Thankfully wiki has citations too. Wiki link is dead, but theres this article http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/ocean-acidification/kolbert-text
Anyway I did A lot of reading Nat Geo and other articles between video games. Also talking to people about and discussing it and getting their opinions.
That has to be bullshit because we know climate change is real and man made. The planet is doomed unless everyone rides their bike to work and eats rice cakes.
I'm sure it will please you to know that your straw man has helped to sequester just a bit of carbon that would otherwise have remained in the atmosphere!
But if you burn that straw man, you'll release it back again!
Dark Reflection
I saw them a couple of years ago at Ozzfest. They're basically an Iron Maiden / Iced Earth copycat, with the pretentiousness of an 80's hair band but even less talent.
I love this particular idiotic argument, it cracks me up. "The earth is a self regulating system therefore whatever humans do to it, it will just compensate, therefore we can pollute as much as we want."
My reply is always "Your body is a self regulating system therefore whatever you do to it it will just compensate. You can prove the validity of your hypothesis about the planet by simply quaffing a few litres of industrial bleach."
Well, phytoplankton remove an average of 4x their weight in CO2 over their lifetime. The oxygen doesn't count, there's carbon in their waste and then some in their bodies which move up the food chain and are eventually deposited on the sea floor when large predators die.
Plankton outweight all other sea animals combined.
Plankton are only out numbered by Bacteria as far as individual organisms go...
Plankton already sequester 30% of all CO2 released on earth (trees are like 2%)
So yes, plankton blooms could easily remove all the CO2 we're dumping into the atmosphere. But seeding the ocean with iron would put green peace in a tizzy... because their real goal has nothing to do with Global Warming.