'Geo-engineering' might save planet: scientist Published Monday September 29th, 2008 Global Warming Fertilizing oceans to grow plankton could remove a gigatonne of carbon per year, lecturer believes
Nothing, at this stage, will save the Greenland ice cap from melting, raising oceans several feet, says Victor Shahed Smetacek.
Only a massive feat of "geo-engineering" can save the Antarctic ice cap from doing the same, the professor of bio-oceanography at the University of Bremen, Germany, said in an interview from Halifax.
Humanity, led by the United Nations, must remove huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the air over the next century, he will argue in an address at Mount Allison University this week.
Smetacek, born in India of an Indian mother and German father, attended the conference in Halifax this month of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.
A talk on rising oceans might interest an audience at a university in Sackville, on the Tantramar marsh.
Today, he will speak as part of the President's Speakers Series on Climate Change and Global Citizenship. On Tuesday he will launch the vice-president's seminar series Evolution: 150 Years of Darwin with a lecture, "Understanding plankton evolution in the framework of the arms race."
Phytoplankton, microscopic organisms, might save humanity, he argues.
Smetacek quite seriously proposes to fertilize vast areas of the southern oceans deficient in iron to promote plankton to absorb carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthetic uptake.
Skeletons of dead plankton compose a large part of the sludge at the bottom of deep oceans. So, scientists must figure out how to promote plankton that remove carbon from the air, then take it to the bottom when they die.
We might remove a gigatonne - one trillion kilograms - of carbon from the air each year, Smetacek says. Removing carbon at this rate might save the south polar ice cap if other efforts continue to stop adding more carbon, he said.
Depositing a whole gigatonne of carbon at the bottom of the sea might sound like an effort worthy of Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician and engineer who said that he could move the Earth if he had a place to stand with his pry bar.
However, it would take only five to 10 ocean-going ships, possibly tankers or ore carriers, to fertilize the oceans each year with iron sulphate, a waste product from smelting titanium and iron, he said. http://nbbusinessjournal.canadaeast.com/journal/article/430506 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- a far cheaper method of simply adding used waste" tin" [ iron ] food cans to the oceans, near the coast ,will achieve exactly the same carbon storage as iron sulphate in the deep oceans
once the expert discover the oceans are all connected and so is the air , it matters not where you add the iron , except where other pollutants are already present algae blooms dont happen as the tins rust slowly and algae is eaten as it grows by krill and other phytoplankton
adding waste tin cans to the ocean will cure global warming, and increase fish stocks dramatically, for almost nothing , , by replacing iron we no longer let reach the seas because of increased irrigation , once the experts are forced to get off the gravy train and ask those who have already proven it works
anybody can test it out for little cost , simply add a ton of old tin cans in a wire cage to the sea and watch it for a few months and you too will know how to cure global warming for free
it is that simple , cage them up or scattered makes little difference , the krill will eat the rapidly growing algae and the fish will eat the krill , we eat the fish , and remove carbon for free
old tin cans will cure global warming for free, in ten years, once they try everything else first
