Ocean fertilisation not climate change fix
To assess the viability of ocean fertilisation as a potential climate change fix, the German-Indian Lohafex Project distributed six tonnes of iron fi lings across a 300 square-kilometre area of the Southern Ocean and monitored its effects on the growth of phytoplankton, which have been shown to be stimulated by iron in past experiments.
Like all plants, phytoplankton absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow. After a typical 60-day lifecycle, they die and sink to the ocean fl oor, locking away the carbon they have absorbed.
By two weeks into the ten-week experiment, the phytoplankton had doubled in biomass, but it was being increasingly consumed by copepods (pictured above) – a type of small crustacean. The overall results showed that the amount of CO2 being absorbed was far less than expected.
‘What [this experiment] means is that the Southern Ocean cannot sequester the amount of CO2 that one had hoped,’ Professor Victor Smetacek from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute told the BBC.
May 2009
Like all plants, phytoplankton absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow. After a typical 60-day lifecycle, they die and sink to the ocean fl oor, locking away the carbon they have absorbed.
By two weeks into the ten-week experiment, the phytoplankton had doubled in biomass, but it was being increasingly consumed by copepods (pictured above) – a type of small crustacean. The overall results showed that the amount of CO2 being absorbed was far less than expected.
‘What [this experiment] means is that the Southern Ocean cannot sequester the amount of CO2 that one had hoped,’ Professor Victor Smetacek from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute told the BBC.
May 2009
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