I’ve been following this research since the 1990s. My recollection is that a consensus emerged that it is less effective than originally hypothesized and there are some adverse side effects that would be difficult to manage. This is why it fell out of favor.
As I recall, while it does cause significant blooms in the areas that you seed, it also induces nutrient depletion in other regions, suppressing growth there and potentially damaging ecosystems that developed around the natural nutrient gradient. It became apparent that the “free lunch” wasn’t actually free and it was mostly just rearranging where things grew based on the interaction of various nutrient gradients. The net effect is therefore much smaller than originally thought and there is a risk that it inadvertently reduces the output of important fisheries due to complex oceanic chemistry interactions that are not fully understood.
I don’t think much has changed with respect to our understanding of it. It is currently filed under “probably a bad idea” as far as I know. But that’s why we do the science.
How does it cause depletion in other areas?
FWIW, I think the danger of excessive blooms is overstated. Most of the ocean is a desert nutritionally.
The flow and distribution of nutrients in the ocean follow weak gradients from their underlying sources in a kind of thermodynamic equilibrium. Some areas will have nutrient excesses based on geography, geochemistry, and limitations on consumption rate due to dependencies on other nutrients.
If iron is the rate limiting ingredient, then when you seed an area with iron a bunch of other nutrients are consumed in the process that currently are not being consumed. This changes the chemical equilibrium driving those other nutrient flows in the ocean and may stop critical nutrients flows into areas that rely on them. Any major local change to nutrient balance changes the equilibrium and thermodynamic gradients of the entire system.
In hindsight this is kind of obvious. There are similar equilibrium problems in large chemical reactors too and the ocean is just a giant reactor vessel to a first approximation. I think the original assumption was that the ocean is so big that no one would notice but long distance effects on local nutrient balances were observed such that increased sequestration productivity in one area was at least partially offset by losses of productivity in other areas due to new nutrient bottlenecks.
In principle modeling the entire system would allow one to inject the right nutrients at the right handful of spots to maximize aggregate sequestration performance with minimal risk. Building such models is still very much beyond us.
Wouldn't this only be an effect that happens on a small scale? It means that you'll see large changes elsewhere from small blooms in the ocean because of depletion elsewhere. Ok. But that cannot occur if you do this to an entire ecosystem (which can be the ocean, sure, but perhaps doing it to a large lake first would make more sense.
Second aren't we already doing large scale iron fertilization of the oceans? Not "intentionally" but simply rivers with human economic or residential activity along them.
Sorry about a naive question. If additional nutrients causes imbalance due to taking nutrients from other areas. Cant we add those nutrients in as well?
I am starting to think China will be the first to experiment with this in large enough scale.
How does consumption of a nutrient stop its production?
It's not stopping the production, but changing the flow.
suppose there's a flow of nutrients of type A from area one to area two. Currently, iron is the chokepoint in nutrient consumption of A, so that A is never completely consumed while going from one to two.
By adding excess iron into area one, or in the middle of the region between this flow from area one to two, you now have the possibility to consume A completely as iron no longer limits A's consumption.
So what happens to area two's consumption of A, if it became more scarce? May be nothing - or may be you now have another choke point of resources that wasn't there previously, leading to a change. If you weren't sure if this change would occur, or dont know, perhaps adding iron to area one is not a good idea, until such outcomes have been studied and acertained first.
I only use my common sense here, but it doesn't stop the production it just prevents the transport from the source to the destination through the area that was previously iron deficient and couldn't use the fully the other nutrient which passed on to another area.
In iron sulfate fertilization you're only adding two nutrients (iron and sulfur). Now that nutrient is in excess in one area so metabolic uptake of all nutrients increases locally, creating a concentration gradient that reduces nutrients available elsewhere. This leads to one of the other limiting nutrients like phosphorus or nitrogen preventing growth of other life forms in another location since the concentration gradient created by the phytoplankton sucked it away. Also sulfur concentration changes metabolic pathways through epigenetic effects so there are other effects just within the phytoplankton that depend on the species that happens to be present that will determine what the exact concentration gradient would look like. The dynamic of nutrients shifting of the metabolome makes modeling and risk assessment difficult since some species are known to produce toxins which can bioaccumulate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycotoxin
Not sure if it's a time to cry about the loss of a bush of roses when the forests are burning. Any natural iron supplementation like blowing the dust from Sahara or a river carrying out to the ocean waters full of red soil should be causing similar effects. Granted, rivers are likely carry other nutrients, often in excess, but this also does disrupt what grows or not in the surrounding areas.
Iron fertilization may still be pointless since the effectiveness is being debated afaik. On the other hand if it does work well for a competitive price compared to other methods, I would rather have a fish in the middle of the ocean full of algal neurotoxins and lower global temperature than the same fish cooked. No need to at it though.
Adding sulfur as a nutrient to the ocean is unlikely to have much effect, as seawater already contains about 3 ppm sulfate, thousands of times the concentration of iron.
Totally agree: it's filed under "promising but risky" for a reason
@grok what are some papers supporting this rather negative take and are there other papers that refute the skepticism?
When a big systemic circle is imbalanced, we often feel that adding a smaller circle of push or nudge will balance it.
But there are wobbly second order effects and the curves finally settle in the third order, often further away from our initial imagination.
Iatrogenics is the branch of science studying outcomes where interventions make the situation worse off.
Not a judgement on this or any other method, but a recurring pattern to be aware of.
…yet, it is also an excuse for not trying to address problems with technology. “The precautionary principle” has paralyzed Europe, for instance.
> “The precautionary principle” has paralyzed Europe, for instance.
A lot of modernity problems would be solved if those in power learned to sit on their hands and do nothing.
I'd like to see them give it another shot off the coast of the usa/canada just like last time. To see if the pink salmon population absolutely explodes like last time they did it.
From what Recall, this is currently illegal under international law about dumping things into the ocean.
But it feels like we're tinkering with a system we barely understand. Ocean ecosystems are delicate, and messing with nutrient flows or phytoplankton populations could have weird downstream effects (literally and figuratively).
You're not wrong, but I think people also underestimate how out of balance the system already is.
It's not like Earth is this perfectly spinning top that some people want to give a nudge. It's more like it's already crashing about while we keep whacking it harder and harder with billions more barrels of oil injected into the atmosphere every year.
I agree we shouldn't recklessly throw new shit at it, but incremental experiments might be worthwhile.
But humans have already been tinkering (tinkering is not the word to describe large scale disturbances) with delicate systems we barely understand since the industrial revolution. But when it comes to technological solutions like this, somehow people think that's too risky.
Given the parallels to antimicrobial resistance—and now agricultural overlap via azole fungicides—it feels like we’re sleepwalking into a serious global health issue. Curious if anyone here has experience in pharma, biotech, or policy who can shed light on what's structurally blocking progress.
I don't mean to be too flippant, but the way climate change is going, the Australian bushfires mentioned in the article will be a regular occurrence. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to know where the tipping point for "enough" to contain our current carbon emissions is. At least there is some upside to it..
The other way to promote plankton growth is through mimicking whale excreta. The https://www.whalexfoundation.org/ is engaged in this. We have far fewer whales in the ocean that we had hundreds of years ago. Ocean plankton, specifically phytoplankton, accounts for approximately 40% of the total global carbon captured and stored.
The hard part is actually measuring how much carbon you can sequester per kg of 'fake' whale poop.
Recent Bloomberg video: https://youtu.be/ZnXHJD0UI5U?t=812
(Disclosure - I am peripherally involved.)
So it was actually pirates all this time:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pirate_Global_Warm...
Being a get-rich-quick alternative to whaling, piracy captured enough of the workforce to slow down the extinction of whales.
I jest, of course, but it's fun to look for ways a mere correlation might be a causal relationship.
Instead of mimicking whale excretes we could ... let real whales excrete. that is doing everything to preserve remaining whale populations and encourage the formation of new populations.
Definitely, I'd love for there to be more whales!
We can do more then one thing at a time.
Evidence suggests we can't really even do one thing at a time.
Hehe.. to get more whales in the oceans, not doing something is a good start.
>The hard part is actually measuring how much carbon you can sequester per kg of 'fake' whale poop.
Do we have a rough estimate of this number? I assume the cost of whale poop can be low once it is mass manufactured. But the real cost is the actual deployment?
We do, we have a model and some experimental data. I can get back later for you with some numbers.
Later .. 200 litres of 'aqua food' for one tonne of sequestered carbon.
How long does it take to capture that one tonne of carbon?
Our Annual CO2 emission is about 40B tons. In order to be Carbon Negative we need to capture 60 - 80B tons / year.
That is about 80B x 200 Litres of Aqua Food. Or 16 Trillion Litres. Roughly 3 to 4 times the amount of soft drinks Coca cola sold per year.
And doing it continuously for 20 years we would revert back to about 80s.
Darkening the water of the whole planet so that it absorbs more sunlight and reducing albedo sounds counterproductive.
Maybe don’t do this.
How far is our technology from being able to develop species of fish, that would bring up dirt from ocean floor, doing fertilization by themselves?
It's almost certainly impossible to create a species of fish that can take things from the ocean floor all the way to the surface for any significant percentage of the ocean. And we are certainly nowhere near having the ability to bionegineer such complex behaviors, we're far enough that you wouldn't even have a reasonable estimate for how long it might take to get there.
Why is it impossible? it can be as simple as a bottom feeder species that goes to the surface to poop, basically like whales, or have cells in their gut that produce fiber making their poop float to surface, or a combination of seaweed that produces floating wood, and a fish that builds nests on it. The second version is probably in reach of current technology.
the average depth of the ocean floor is something like two and a half miles and the pressure at that depth is 400 atmospheres.
I’ve always loved this idea but I’m scared of what unforeseen monkey’s paw issues might arise.
Valid concern, but it seems like the glide path—continued carbon dioxide buildup and climate change—might eventually be worse than the unknown unknowns. (I suppose how one makes that decision is the challenge, hence the need for further study, per the article.)
This is one of the few carbon capture approaches that appears to be able to approach global scale, so I'm rooting for it. Even enhanced weathering suffers from needing to move billions of tons of rock, but scattering trace minerals seems pretty high leverage. The sheer mass of material that must be removed from the atmosphere is otherwise very intimidating.
I think everybody who has thought much about it has similar concerns. I'd propose we start soon, start small, ramp up slowly, and be thorough about the data collection.
As uncomfortable as it is to experiment on the only planet you have, even worse would be to wait too long and then, in a panic, try to do everything that might possibly work all at once and to as extreme a degree as possible.
Once there will be a business around this and people will make money the businesses will maintain a lobby to keep doing it and even increase the operation.
Totally get that. It's got that classic "elegant in theory, terrifying in practice" energy
I find the attitude of "it's more important to not be blamed if something goes wrong than it is to solve the problem" to be incredibly annoying. It's like the epitome of bureaucracy.
Taking geoengineering seriously is a sign of truly taking climate change seriously.
So is nuclear energy but not much happening there. Also renewables of course.
Nuclear energy should be taken seriously, then be dismissed as too expensive.
I have thought about this a lot from the perspective of cheapness, and think that simply having giant teathered robot crawlers pump ocean sediment back up into the top layers of the water collum and inject any missing nutrients into the naturaly found mix. Off shore areas that are shallow enough for wind, oil and other development, could then provide the nessesary power and servicing platforms. so , some sort of power source, undersea electrical cables to each unit, a hose that goes up to a submerged unit that has the discharge, and if needed holds additional elements for dispersal, possibly having a surface floating element will make more sense, or having tanks that sink down to the bottom crawler, and when empty are filled eith air to float them for recovery.
This, and stratospheric aerosol injection are both:
1. Incredibly cost effective 2. Mimic natural effects 3. Could pretyy easily cause anotger ice age if miscalculated
I wonder at what point the potential benefits will outweigh the potential risks for using these geoengineering techniques. Cant be far off, right?
Sulfur dioxide injection could halt global warming in its tracks for a measly $18 billion a year. I wonder if a vigilante billionaire climate activist gonna take a try in the next few decades..
> 3. Could pretyy easily cause anotger ice age if miscalculated
Could they? At least for stratospheric aerosol injection it would be easy to just stop doing it if things seemed like they were tipping. It doesn't happen _that_ fast, we'd have time to notice and react.
It depends on how badly we may miscalculate the aerosol deterioration rate. If we inject a bit too much and it stubbornly stays airborne, that would be a hard geoengineering problem to tackle!
I'd say that things are not bad enough for anyone with the means to take the risk. When the things get bad enough for the Overton window to admit geoengineering, it may be too late for simple and affordable solutions, as usual.
We have some experimental data on this, though, since jetliners and volcanoes both inject sulfur into the stratosphere. The global air traffic halt of 2001 and the aftereffects of eruptions have been heavily studied.
(It would be ironic if the world's response to fossil CO2 emission is to mandate extra high sulfur jet fuel, but nothing would surprise me)
Another example is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora
Imagine a nation state started doing this. Lets imagine the Netherlands because they realise that it is worth it for them alone when so much of their land is at sea level. They hope to reduce worldwide temps by 1.75C (to pre industrial levels) within a year or so, which would immediately halt sea level rise.
I think other nations will demand they stop - with threats of sanctions - simply because there are other nations who now depend on the higher temperatures and increased agricultural output.
Conversely, imagine a nation state like India that will experience mass death events if heat/humidity waves become too much worse. They would continue geoengineering even in the face of threat of nuclear retaliation because the consequences would be so dire.
Don’t build another boat to do it, grant ships that install iron distributors a tax credit
I hope China will look into this.
The Western mind will think it is "unnatural" and playing God with nature on a completely unprecedented scale but large-scale geo engineering like this is probably the few options we have left.
western companies won't do it unless money is gained from it. Nothing god related keeping them from taking action, just the lack of money related incentives.
Confirmed. Simple naked greed . Where is the money in that? A few quid for the coffers?
