Where To Proceed With Ocean Iron Fertilization

This weeks Science offers commentary on the use of Ocean Iron Fertilization (OIF) to mitigate rising carbon dioxide levels. The author list is a dream team of ocean productivity experts who know what they are talking about. The 1 page commentary is chock-o-block full of great quotes.

The efficacy by which OIF sequesters atmospheric CO2 to the deep sea remains poorly constrained, and we do not understand the intended and unintended biogeochemical and ecological impacts. Environmental perturbations from OIF are nonlocal and are spread over a large area by ocean circulation, which makes long- term verification and assessment very difficult

and

OIF could make only a partial contribution to mitigation of global CO increase.

The group lists 7 items that need to be included in future research on OIF. The ending paragraph simply states that selling carbon offsets from OIF experiments is premature and use of OIF will come with an "alteration of ocean ecosystems" with potentially unforseen consequences.

Buesseler et al. (2008) Ocean Iron Fertilization--Moving Forward in a Sea of Uncertainty. Science 319:162

DOI: 10.1126/science.1154305

More like this

Rick points out that Planktos is back. Planktos is one of those groups who wanted to fertilize the oceans with iron to sequester C02 out of the atmosphere. Both Rick and I were skeptical. Of course we weren't the only ones. This group feels it is premature to sell carbon offsets from the first…
Russ comments in our previous post Au contrair. The record shows that Planktos was long advocating and involved in ecorestoration not merely recently. The Way Back machine easily proves this. The strawman of Planktos that was created and the ad hominem attacks that were and are the hallmark of…
Admittedly, before reading the actual paper I was a little uneasy about the latest paper in PNAS by Goldberg et al. The paper describes a deep-sea basalt formation that would allow for storage of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. The area is the Juan de Fuca plate of the Oregon and Washington Coasts…
a special guest post by John Guinotte, Marine Conservation Biology Institute The answer is uncertain as very few manipulative experiments have been conducted to test how deep-sea corals react to changes in temperature, seawater chemistry (pH), water motion (currents), and food availability. It is…

The group lists 7 items that need to be included on future research on OIF. The ending paragraph simply states that selling carbon offsets from OIF experiments is premature and that use of OIF will come with a "alteration of ocean ecosystems" with potentially unforseen consequences.

I hope the research continues. It's nice they are being cautious, but I have heard that when they make possible extrapolations the carbon sequestration could be highly significant!
Dave Briggs :~)

It remains an interesting subject of research, but I'm really glad that the proper attention is being paid to its drawbacks and limitations. Any increase in local ocean productivity will have all sorts of unintended consequences, and the article linked by Jim Lemire above makes a good case for caution. In addition to hydrogen sulfide production, there is the issue of the uptake and sequestration of limiting nutrients other than iron, such as phosphorus and silica. We still know so little about the biochemical effects of a bloom, and causing large blooms with thought only toward their effects on a single compound (CO2) is dangerous thinking. I hold out some hope for the method, but it should certainly continue to be addressed with caution. We have such a poor record of manipulations, and so many of them were done with the best of intentions.