Ocean Iron-Seeding Concept To Fight Warming A Bust

A once-promising theory that seeding oceans with iron to create plankton blooms to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere has turned out to be impractical in the long term, a study released says.

A study led by New Zealand's University of Otago of Dunedin found that while a ton of iron would fertilise a phytoplankton bloom, it would also require at least 5,000 tons of silicate to sustain it. "It's just not practical," Otago oceanographer Philip Boyd said in a paper published in the science journal Nature and issued on Friday by the university.

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In 1999, Mr Boyd and a team of other New Zealand and international scientists distributed around 8,000 kilograms of an iron compound in solution over a patch of the Southern Ocean eight kilometres in diameter. The result was a five-fold increase in phytoplankton stocks during the developing bloom and it was believed that simply adding iron might be the answer to increasing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide locked up in the ocean.

EDIT

After 18 days of a similar experiment in the Gulf of Alaska, the iron-induced bloom declined and satellite pictures show merely a ghost of the plankton-rich patch that had blossomed initially. "We think the decline was initiated by the drop-off in iron levels, but the secondary factor is the removal of all of the silicate by phytoplankton," Mr Boyd said."

EDIT

http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=5250

why does that sound like a BAD idea?

stimulated an enhanced flux of particulate organic carbon from the fertilized patch (that's how they are supposed to remove CO2 from the atmosphere).

Grazers and bacteria rapidly consume and remineralize most the the newly produced organic carbon right back to CO2.

Large scale iron fertilization would not draw down significant quantities of atmospheric CO2 and would result in the deliberate eutrophication of large areas of the ocean.

It's just a bad idea all around.

Wouldn't this be the cheapest way
to create this stuff?

I mean I've seen alot of posts on the cheapest
best way to create it for free energy use purposes.

is no answer to climate change.