Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Massive CO2-Sequestration Experiment Now Shrimp-Food!
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090327-iron-seeding.html
Huge Man-Made Algae Swarm Devoured--Bad for Climate?
Kelly Hearn
for National Geographic News
March 27, 2009
A giant experiment went awry at sea this month.
Shrimplike animals devoured 159 square miles (300 square kilometers) of artificially stimulated algae meant to fight global warming-casting serious doubt on ocean fertilization as a climate-control tool.
For years, scientists have proposed supercharging algae growth by dumping tons of iron into the ocean.
Iron is a necessary element for algae photosynthesis-the process by which the plants convert sunlight into energy-but it is relatively rare in the ocean.
(Related: "Plan to Dump Iron in Ocean as Climate Fix Attracts Debate".)
Algae suck carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, out of the atmosphere. The algae then generally fall to the seafloor-sequestering the CO2 indefinitely.
About a dozen such "iron fertilization" experiments have already been done-with mixed success.
But experts have warned of unintended consequences, such as unpredictable reactions in the ecosystem.
And that's just what happened during a recent, large-scale iron dump in the South Atlantic, the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany announced this week.
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