

Tonnes of iron dumped off B.C.'s coast - koski
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Tonnes+iron+dumped+coast/7395723/story.html

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pav3l
I was on Haida Gwaii couple years ago with 2 friends. Pretty much every local
we have encountered was very friendly and offered us home canned salmon for
free. There were golden eagles and huge ravens everywhere. Ancient
rainforests. I got the impression that the last thing Haida people needed is
technology _enhancing_ their natural resources. The place just seemed perfect.
Oh well, I guess there is money to be made, so never mind...

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potatolicious
The depletion of salmon stocks goes beyond Haida Gwaii (for those who studied
geography earlier, they used to be known as the Queen Charlotte Islands).

Chronic overfishing in both Alaska and the rest of BC has contributed to the
dramatic loss of salmon population. I don't think the desire to increase the
salmon population is in and of itself a bad thing...

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cancle
This idea has been around for a while, but I didn't realise there were field
experiments going on. Basically, iron particles are dumped into the ocean
which encourages a massive algal bloom. A proportion of the algae will sink to
the bottom of the ocean, trapping the carbon. John Martin, an oceanographer,
famously quipped: "Give me half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you the next
ice age.”

There's a better article here:
[http://planetsave.com/2012/07/22/geoengineering-news-
controv...](http://planetsave.com/2012/07/22/geoengineering-news-
controversial-ocean-iron-fertilization-experiment-succeeds-as-carbon-sink/)

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JamisonM
This is not a field experiment, it is more of a crack-pot scheme. There is
very little science going on here. I suppose the most unfortunate part of this
misguided adventure is that very little will really be learned from it since
it was not designed as a proper experiment.

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stephengillie
From the article: _The Guardian...reports that George's team dumped about 100
tonnes of_ iron sulphate _into the ocean from a fishing boat 370 kilometres
west of Haida Gwaii in July._

From Wiki: _Iron(II) sulfate (Br.E. iron(II) sulphate) or ferrous sulfate is
the chemical compound with the formula FeSO4. It is used medically to treat
iron deficiency, and also for industrial applications._

So it's not like they dumped a bunch of scrap iron parts or old machinery into
the ocean. This is a fairly common chemical compound with many biological
uses.

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ceejayoz
> So it's not like they dumped a bunch of scrap iron parts or old machinery
> into the ocean.

No, it's much worse. Chunks of scrap iron isn't going to have much of an
effect on the environment when compared to finely ground particles.

> This is a fairly common chemical compound with many biological uses.

Water's a common chemical compound with many biological uses, but that doesn't
make a tsunami non-destructive.

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stephengillie
It's still less destructive than an equal-sized equal-energy wave of sulphuric
acid.

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praptak
Carbon credits for dumping iron into the ocean? The artificial plankton bloom
may absorb some CO2 but how permanent is that? It would be nice to see some
research on that.

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ChuckMcM
The basic theory is the plankton grow, turn CO2 in to plankton, which get
eaten. The result is less CO2 in the air. How much less is an interesting
question.

What I find amazing is how controversial this is. If you can actually pull a
significant fraction of CO2 out of the atmosphere and return it to the sea,
why wouldn't you do that? It would seem to be potentially a huge weapon to
wield against global warming and relative to other ideas is both actionable
and hugely less expensive. And yet even modest experiments are fought tooth
and nail.

Its a strange dissonance that conspiracy theorists love but I write up to a
more generalized fear of change. It will be interesting to see how this one
turns out.

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bct
If you can bring in toads to eat a significant fraction of the beetles that
are destroying the sugar cane crops, why wouldn't you do that?

(Because: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia> . These are
complex, poorly understood systems, and the results will almost certainly not
be what you expected. This isn't engineering.)

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geon
Iron sulfate doesn't reproduce.

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mryan
The point still stands - although you are in control of one variable in this
equation ("iron sulfate doesn't reproduce"), it would still be impossible to
predict the consequences.

Iron sulfate does indeed lack reproductive capability. But it attracts
plankton, which is a wide category of organism - some plankton can reproduce.

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jlgreco
So long as the end result of all these extra plankton is not worse than
"climate change threatens human civilization", I think we'd have a net gain.

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wonderzombie
"We need to do something. This is something we can do. Therefore we need to do
this."

It's a false dichotomy. There's probably a wide range of things we can do, and
picking an option just because it happens to be there & feasible, regardless
of evidence of merit, doesn't seem like a winning strategy.

Put another way, you _could_ cut off your hand to treat an infected wound.
It's "feasible." But is it anything remotely approaching the best way?
Furthermore, what if it turns out that artificially seeding the ocean with
plankton is approximately as disastrous for the health of the ocean?

~~~
jlgreco
_Obviously_ I do not advocate doing something for which there is no evidence
of benefit... We shouldn't do it because it is merely "something", we do it
because we can demonstrate that it does _more harm than good_.

If there are _demonstrable_ benefits, then _"do the benefits outweigh the
risks"_ is something that we must _consider_. To categorically strike out
broad classes of solutions because something _might_ go wrong, _without even
considering the severity of the possibility_ , is to advocate inaction.

 _Any_ solution to this particular problem is met with this nonsensical
_"something non-descript might go wrong, so we better sit on our asses
instead"_ mentality. What we should be asking ourselves is _"What solution has
both the greatest good/bad ratio, and can be scaled enough to actually solve
the problem"_. Things are _going_ to go wrong; to stop exploring a possibility
as soon as we learn that something could go wrong is naive and if
universalized will lead to our downfall.

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wonderzombie
_"do the benefits outweigh the risks'_

But that's just it: we have no way to answer that question. We can't say if
it's a good idea because we don't even know if it's even going to yield good
results, let alone what cost those good results come at.

I agree that we won't hit on some perfect solution which has no trade-off. But
making a decision without even knowing what trade-off you're making could
actually make things worse! Imagine if this does approximately nothing
substantial for climate change, yet it kills off a ton of species. Now we're
on a planet with an destabilizing climate and a substantially more
destabilized ecosystem.

High stakes cut both ways. You can win big by doing something bold just as you
can lose even bigger or sooner. And having people unilaterally try out their
pet theories seems like a recipe for disaster. They'll likely be long dead
before the effects of their actions are realized anyway.

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tocomment
Is it possible we'll see noticable global cooling from this or is it too
small?

Legal/approved or not, it seems like this will be a great data point and it
will be good to have as much information as possible on strategies like this
is global warming ever becomes a pressing issue.

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kaybe
For any noticable effects on temperature it is way too small. Similar
experiments have been conducted by Scientists near Antarctica in the past
(including international protest after it became known), resulting in big
algae patches visible on satellite images (see the slides in [1] for
examples).

[1] I'm referring to the slides here: [http://www.iup.uni-
heidelberg.de/institut/studium/lehre/lehr...](http://www.iup.uni-
heidelberg.de/institut/studium/lehre/lehre/Climate_Engineering/11_CE_SS-2012_Climate%20Engineering_Ocean_Fertilization.pdf)

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gilgad13
If the practice of ocean fertilization is illegal, how was he hoping to redeem
the carbon credits?

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jonathlee
What an incredibly slanted article.

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buf
Our first true James Bond villain

~~~
d2vid
Greenfinger

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dredmorbius
The spy who slimed me.

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bwb
ya anyone got any links to more info on this process? possible damage?
possible gain?

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jsvaughan
There's a page linked from the above link:

[http://planetsave.com/2011/01/26/iron-seeding-of-ocean-
may-p...](http://planetsave.com/2011/01/26/iron-seeding-of-ocean-may-promote-
toxic-plankton/)

Which says

"...while iron seeding does indeed promote algal blooms, not all alga are
equal — some forms can be poisonous to other lifeforms. One such form of
plankton — a species of diatom by the name of Pseudo-nitzschia — happens also
to be strongly associated with a wide-ranging neurotoxin called domoic acid
(DA). The toxin may be a metabolic by-product or perhaps an adaptation
(survival strategy) of this planktonic life form."

"Given the proposed use of iron fertilization strategies to reduce atmospheric
CO2 and ocean acidification, the authors caution: “…consideration of the
potentially serious ecosystem impacts associated with DA is prudent."

