Does Dumping Iron in the Ocean Sequester CO2?
BOSTON, Mass – If we made made the globe warm, we can make the globe cool. That’s the premise and promise of geoengineering, the name given to intentional attempts to alter the climate. But, the science behind most of the current schemes is relatively unproven. Perhaps the most attempted geoengineering strategy is to put small amounts of iron into the ocean, which spawns hordes of plankton that eat CO2 and carry it into the depths of the abyss. Or so the story goes. Ken Buesseler a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute spoke on the science of this process, known as ocean iron fertilization at a symposium addressing the feasibility of this type of carbon sequestration at the AAAS annual meeting. His talk came a week after Planktos, one of two iron fertilization startups, indefinitely suspended its operations (as Earth2Tech cleverly put it, “Planktos Dead in the Water”). You need to know three things from Buesseler’s talk, which was based on looking at twelve fertili
