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Ocean Iron Fertilization
- Mistletoe 2y agoI’ve always loved this idea but I’m scared of what unforeseen monkey’s paw issues might arise.
- ryandamm 2y agoValid 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.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI 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.
- baruch 2y agoOnce 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.
- jonstewart 2y agoIron enrichment of the ocean seems to have fallen in popularity compared to atmospheric aerosolizing, but the iron enrichment seems less risky to me. I agree that it seems better to start now, start small, and collect as much data as possible to understand all the subtle dynamics in play. That seems better than holding off for twenty years and then going big in a desperate hurry.
- pfdietz 2y agoI 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.
- ErigmolCt 2y agoTotally get that. It's got that classic "elegant in theory, terrifying in practice" energy
- jandrewrogers 2y agoI’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.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- emmelaich 2y agoHow 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.
- thatcat 2y agoIn 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycotoxin
- zonkerdonker 2y agoThis, 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..
- londons_explore 2y agoImagine 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.
- pfdietz 2y agoConversely, 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.
- vosper 2y ago> 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.
- nine_k 2y agoIt 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.
- Quarrel 2y agoI 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..
- emmelaich 2y agoThe other way to promote plankton growth is through mimicking whale excreta. The https://www.whalexfoundation.org/ 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 https://youtu.be/ZnXHJD0UI5U?t=812 (Disclosure - I am peripherally involved.)
- ksec 2y ago>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?
- emmelaich 2y agoWe 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.
- ksec 2y agoHow 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.
- mystified5016 2y agoWe can't do it all this way. For every ton of carbon absorbed you add some multiple of that in plankton biomass. I'm no ocean ecologist, but it seems like there might be several consequences to adding billions of tons of plankton to the ocean
- kaonwarb 2y agoTaking geoengineering seriously is a sign of truly taking climate change seriously.
- emmelaich 2y agoSo is nuclear energy but not much happening there. Also renewables of course.
- pfdietz 2y agoNuclear energy should be taken seriously, then be dismissed as too expensive.
- marcosdumay 2y agoYes, but as long as you keep research so it may become cheap in the future. It has lots of niches where it's actually cheaper anyway. It just can't be the dominant form of energy generation.
- MostlyStable 2y agoThe cost of nuclear is not an inherent feature, it is a conscious choice. Choosing to make nuclear expensive, especially while allowing other, dirtier, less reliable power generation methods remain cheap, is a sign of not taking climate change seriously.
- pfdietz 2y agoYes, yes, I know. It's always someone else's fault. Nuclear can never fail, it can only be failed by those unworthy of its glory.
- simmerup 2y agoLike the alcoholic not changing their ways, in the back of the mind counting on that kidney/liver transplant to save them
- dtquad 2y agoI 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.
- joseppu 2y agowestern 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.
- ForOldHack 2y agoConfirmed. Simple naked greed . Where is the money in that? A few quid for the coffers?
- init7 2y agoWhen 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.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago…yet, it is also an excuse for not trying to address problems with technology. “The precautionary principle” has paralyzed Europe, for instance.
- chr1 2y agoHow far is our technology from being able to develop species of fish, that would bring up dirt from ocean floor, doing fertilization by themselves?
- tsimionescu 2y agoIt'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.
- chr1 2y agoWhy 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.
- nullc 2y agothe average depth of the ocean floor is something like two and a half miles and the pressure at that depth is 400 atmospheres.
- dexterous8339 2y agoLook up the blobfish and how it more or less explodes when taken from the deep ocean. Very, very few animals can handle the pressure differential between the top and bottom of the ocean. It's pretty much just whales, and they can only do it because they're so goddamn big
- WithinReason 2y agoYou're actually describing whales
- badmonster 2y agoGiven 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.
- vasco 2y agoDarkening the water of the whole planet so that it absorbs more sunlight and reducing albedo sounds counterproductive.
- bobbygoodlatte 2y agoWouldn't the darkening be temporary? After the bloom, the plankton are either consumed by ocean life, or die off and sink to the bottom (sequestering carbon in either case)
- ErigmolCt 2y agoBut 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).
- rex_lupi 2y agoBut 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- causal 2y agoYou'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.
- ErigmolCt 2y agoI guess my main worry is that in trying to "fix" one imbalance, we might accidentally create another
- api 2y agoWe're already tinkering by dumping shitloads of carbon into the atmosphere.
- daedrdev 2y agoFrom what Recall, this is currently illegal under international law about dumping things into the ocean.
- pftburger 2y agoDon’t build another boat to do it, grant ships that install iron distributors a tax credit
- api 2y agoI wonder if there's anything that could be added to marine bunker diesel fuel that would do this without screwing up the engine?
- metalman 2y agoI 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.
- TrexArms 2y agoI'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.
- lightedman 2y agoIt might, the question becomes "At what cost to other areas?"
- netfl0 2y agoMaybe don’t do this.
- lumost 2y agoI'd love to see some small scale experiments in geoengineering. Despite multiple climate agreements, over my life time - I have not seen any actual progress on climate change outside of technological advancement. Technology such as wind, solar, BEVs, and similar appear to be coming far too slowly to avoid catastrophe. Perhaps China's recent push on BEV and similar technologies will tip the scale, but I am skeptical. Human's have been geoengineering for millenia via clear cutting of forests, bio engineering of crops, fertilization of fields, damming of rivers, and other activities. While there will certainly be consequences and side effects, even a partial sequestering of ~20B tonnes of CO2 per year would meet the Kyoto protocol. Are the consequences of Geo Engineering so disastrous that we should accept the worst case scenarios of global warming.
- slashdev 2y agoDoomberg has this theory that worldwide consumption of a source of energy never decreases, any fossil fuels extracted will be burned somewhere, and green regulations or subsidies just shift around who does the burning. Adding new sources of energy to the mix only reduces the rate of growth in fossil fuel consumption, but it still goes up. Oil consumption didn't reduce coal consumption, it just added a new energy type. Same for natural gas. So far they've been right. Decreased coal usage in developed countries has been offset by increased coal usage, of the now cheaper coal, in developing countries. German electric consumers are effectively subsidizing Chinese and Indian consumers. Eventually that will turn around, if only because we start running out of fossil fuels, and the thesis will fall apart. But it will take far longer than we have, and we have far more fossil fuels than we can afford to extract and burn. That means the ONLY way to address climate change, which is a global problem, is through technological innovation. Regulation is a dead end, and just looking at the track record of regulation so far, it's hard to deny that. That means making green alternatives that are better, and we're making some good progress on that. Electric cars are better in most ways for most uses except price. Solve that last one and they'll quickly displace combustion vehicles for most uses. Range is already good enough most of the time for most of the people. It may also mean doing some geoengineering to soften the impact of global warming that will continue for multiple centuries if we don't intervene.