What Is The Research Status Of OIF?
Scientific understanding of the potential of OIF comes from a substantial body of peer-reviewed literature on 12 publicly-funded open ocean experiments, as well as a much larger body of work on the “biological pump”, which has been the subject of research by multiple decade-long international programs such as VERTEX (e.g. [Knauer et al., 1990], the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) , [Ducklow et al., 2001], [Karl et al., 2001], and the recent VERTIGO experiments that studied carbon flux into the “twilight zone” of the ocean below the euphotic zone (e.g. [Buesseler et al., 2007]). Studies of the response of the ocean to the 2-20x dust flux to the oceans during glacial periods and the associated decrease in atmospheric CO2 provide useful inference about the impact of OIF could have at larger spatial scales[Cassar et al., 2007]. Finally, a growing body of work on model simulations of OIF also provide scenarios of the response to the ocean to larger-scale OIF, and in the last few years
