[HN Gopher] Ocean Iron Fertilization
___________________________________________________________________
Ocean Iron Fertilization
Author : 1970-01-01
Score : 78 points
Date : 2025-04-15 14:05 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.whoi.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.whoi.edu)
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I've always loved this idea but I'm scared of what unforeseen
| monkey's paw issues might arise.
| ryandamm wrote:
| Valid 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__ wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Once 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 wrote:
| Iron 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Totally get that. It's got that classic "elegant in theory,
| terrifying in practice" energy
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I'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.
| emmelaich wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| In 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
| elmolino89 wrote:
| Not sure if it's a time to cry about the loss of a bush of
| roses when the forests are burning. Any natural iron
| supplementation like blowing the dust from Sahara or a
| river carrying out to the ocean waters full of red soil
| should be causing similar effects. Granted, rivers are
| likely carry other nutrients, often in excess, but this
| also does disrupt what grows or not in the surrounding
| areas.
|
| Iron fertilization may still be pointless since the
| effectiveness is being debated afaik. On the other hand if
| it does work well for a competitive price compared to other
| methods, I would rather have a fish in the middle of the
| ocean full of algal neurotoxins and lower global
| temperature than the same fish cooked. No need to at it
| though.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Adding sulfur as a nutrient to the ocean is unlikely to
| have much effect, as seawater already contains about 3 ppm
| sulfate, thousands of times the concentration of iron.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The flow and distribution of nutrients in the ocean follow
| weak gradients from their underlying sources in a kind of
| thermodynamic equilibrium. Some areas will have nutrient
| excesses based on geography, geochemistry, and limitations on
| consumption rate due to dependencies on other nutrients.
|
| If iron is the rate limiting ingredient, then when you seed
| an area with iron a bunch of other nutrients are consumed in
| the process that currently are not being consumed. This
| changes the chemical equilibrium driving those other nutrient
| flows in the ocean and may stop critical nutrients flows into
| areas that rely on them. Any major local change to nutrient
| balance changes the equilibrium and thermodynamic gradients
| of the entire system.
|
| In hindsight this is kind of obvious. There are similar
| equilibrium problems in large chemical reactors too and the
| ocean is just a giant reactor vessel to a first
| approximation. I think the original assumption was that the
| ocean is so big that no one would notice but long distance
| effects on local nutrient balances were observed such that
| increased sequestration productivity in one area was at least
| partially offset by losses of productivity in other areas due
| to new nutrient bottlenecks.
|
| In principle modeling the entire system would allow one to
| inject the right nutrients at the right handful of spots to
| maximize aggregate sequestration performance with minimal
| risk. Building such models is still very much beyond us.
| 1W6MIC49CYX9GAP wrote:
| How does consumption of a nutrient stop its production?
| baruch wrote:
| I only use my common sense here, but it doesn't stop the
| production it just prevents the transport from the source
| to the destination through the area that was previously
| iron deficient and couldn't use the fully the other
| nutrient which passed on to another area.
| chii wrote:
| It's not stopping the production, but changing the flow.
|
| suppose there's a flow of nutrients of type A from area
| one to area two. Currently, iron is the chokepoint in
| nutrient consumption of A, so that A is never completely
| consumed while going from one to two.
|
| By adding excess iron into area one, or in the middle of
| the region between this flow from area one to two, you
| now have the possibility to consume A completely as iron
| no longer limits A's consumption.
|
| So what happens to area two's consumption of A, if it
| became more scarce? May be nothing - or may be you now
| have another choke point of resources that wasn't there
| previously, leading to a change. If you weren't sure if
| this change would occur, or dont know, perhaps adding
| iron to area one is not a good idea, until such outcomes
| have been studied and acertained first.
| ksec wrote:
| Sorry about a naive question. If additional nutrients
| causes imbalance due to taking nutrients from other areas.
| Cant we add those nutrients in as well?
|
| I am starting to think China will be the first to
| experiment with this in large enough scale.
| ruined wrote:
| theoretically yes, but this draws you away from the
| original objective of effective sequestration
| spwa4 wrote:
| Wouldn't this only be an effect that happens on a small
| scale? It means that you'll see large changes elsewhere
| from small blooms in the ocean because of depletion
| elsewhere. Ok. But that cannot occur if you do this to an
| entire ecosystem (which can be the ocean, sure, but perhaps
| doing it to a large lake first would make more sense.
|
| Second aren't we already doing large scale iron
| fertilization of the oceans? Not "intentionally" but simply
| rivers with human economic or residential activity along
| them.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| It's kind of too obvious to notice, but the ocean is
| largely contiguous and interconnected. Any "local" effect
| can be distributed clear across the planet by ocean
| currents in a matter of days.
| staplers wrote:
| aren't we already doing large scale iron fertilization of
| the oceans
|
| Usually the opposite actually. Dams impede a massive
| amount of sediment from flowing into the oceans. Most
| large rivers near humans have multiple dams at this
| point.
| canadiantim wrote:
| It causes hypoxic zones in the water near the blooms, because
| the excessive blooms take up all the oxygen in the water
| leading to hypoxic and deadly conditions afterwards. That's
| why you often see so many dead fish around excessive blooms,
| all the oxygen is used up.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| @grok what are some papers supporting this rather negative take
| and are there other papers that refute the skepticism?
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Totally agree: it's filed under "promising but risky" for a
| reason
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| This, 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 wrote:
| Imagine 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 wrote:
| Conversely, 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It 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.
| wiml wrote:
| We have some experimental data on this, though, since
| jetliners and volcanoes both inject sulfur into the
| stratosphere. The global air traffic halt of 2001 and the
| aftereffects of eruptions have been heavily studied.
|
| (It would be ironic if the world's response to fossil CO2
| emission is to mandate extra high sulfur jet fuel, but
| nothing would surprise me)
| peterbecich wrote:
| Another example is the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
| caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora
| jonstewart wrote:
| I wonder whether you have studied what happened in the past
| several centuries after major volcanic eruptions.
| Quarrel wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The other way to promote plankton growth is through mimicking
| whale excreta. The 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
|
| (Disclosure - I am peripherally involved.)
| ksec wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| We 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
| emmelaich wrote:
| It dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| No form of carbon capture can offset our current
| emissions. Also, it's incredibly stupid to use capture
| for that anyway, as it's always much cheaper to cut the
| emissions at the source.
|
| Carbon capture is for offsetting historical emissions,
| and the few niche ones that are so hard to replace that
| we'll need decades of research.
| Tade0 wrote:
| So it was actually pirates all this time:
|
| https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pirate_Global_Warm...
|
| Being a get-rich-quick alternative to whaling, piracy captured
| enough of the workforce to slow down the extinction of whales.
|
| I jest, of course, but it's fun to look for ways a mere
| correlation might be a causal relationship.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Instead of mimicking whale excretes we could ... let real
| whales excrete. that is doing everything to preserve remaining
| whale populations and encourage the formation of new
| populations.
| XorNot wrote:
| We can do more then one thing at a time.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| Evidence suggests we can't really even do one thing at a
| time.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Hehe.. to get more whales in the oceans, _not_ doing
| something is a good start.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Definitely, I'd love for there to be more whales!
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Can't be more whales if the oceans boil before they can
| repopulate
| kaonwarb wrote:
| Taking geoengineering seriously is a sign of truly taking climate
| change seriously.
| emmelaich wrote:
| So is nuclear energy but not much happening there. Also
| renewables of course.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Nuclear energy should be taken seriously, then be dismissed
| as too expensive.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| Like the alcoholic not changing their ways, in the back of the
| mind counting on that kidney/liver transplant to save them
| dtquad wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| western 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 wrote:
| Confirmed. Simple naked greed . Where is the money in that? A
| few quid for the coffers?
| init7 wrote:
| When 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 wrote:
| ...yet, it is also an excuse for not trying to address problems
| with technology. "The precautionary principle" has paralyzed
| Europe, for instance.
| rglullis wrote:
| > "The precautionary principle" has paralyzed Europe, for
| instance.
|
| A lot of modernity problems would be solved if those in power
| learned to sit on their hands and do nothing.
| simmerup wrote:
| Paralyzed Europe in what respect?
| chr1 wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| the _average_ depth of the ocean floor is something like
| two and a half miles and the pressure at that depth is 400
| atmospheres.
| dexterous8339 wrote:
| Look 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 wrote:
| You're actually describing whales
| chr1 wrote:
| Kind of, but i mean if it was a smaller and more numerous
| species, it could have larger impact.
| badmonster wrote:
| Given 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 wrote:
| Darkening the water of the whole planet so that it absorbs more
| sunlight and reducing albedo sounds counterproductive.
| bobbygoodlatte wrote:
| Wouldn'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 wrote:
| But 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 wrote:
| But 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.
| causal wrote:
| You'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.
| api wrote:
| We're already tinkering by dumping shitloads of carbon into the
| atmosphere.
| daedrdev wrote:
| From what Recall, this is currently illegal under international
| law about dumping things into the ocean.
| pftburger wrote:
| Don't build another boat to do it, grant ships that install iron
| distributors a tax credit
| api wrote:
| I wonder if there's anything that could be added to marine
| bunker diesel fuel that would do this without screwing up the
| engine?
| metalman wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| It might, the question becomes "At what cost to other areas?"
| netfl0 wrote:
| Maybe don't do this.
| lumost wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Doomberg 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from this set of
| facts and claims.
|
| What I think you're saying is:
|
| 1. The only solution to this problem is technology that gives
| us alternatives to fossil fuels.
|
| 2. However, even if this technology becomes ubiquitous and
| cheap, it won't solve the problem by itself. Absent some
| forcing function, people will continue to use fossil fuels as
| long as they're convenient and available.
|
| All of which may be true. But then you make the weird third
| claim:
|
| 3. Regulation is a dead end, and just looking at the track
| record of regulation so far, it's hard to deny that.
|
| It seems to me that the _only possible implication_ you can
| draw from facts (1) and (2) is that we are going to need
| massive amounts of regulation to discourage fossil fuel
| usage, since it won 't drop organically even when sustainable
| alternatives are cheap and available.
|
| PS As a totally unrelated note, here's a chart of global
| whaling activity. https://ourworldindata.org/whaling
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