Iron seeding the Antarctic Seas: Will it work?

Oceanographer John Martin first proposed the "iron hypothesis" in the late 1980s. He believed that the addition of iron into high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll regions would stimulate enormous plankton blooms, and he set out to prove it. Indeed, by sprinkling a relatively small amount of iron over parts of the Pacific Ocean, Martin and his team showed that significant biomass growth could be artificially and effectively induced.

SHOOT: Don't sniff at these experiments. The most significant producers of oxygen and consumers of CO2 in the world are not in the world's forests - they're the plankton blooms in the world's oceans.

clipped from blog.wired.com The Southern Ocean, which includes the majority of the Drake, is high in nutrients, but low in chlorophyll — an indicator of biological activity. While there are plenty of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous in the water column, a relative lack of other nutrients is likely limiting planktonic growth. The primary suspect for the missing ingredient is iron, which makes the area a tempting place to experiment with iron-seeding to stimulate biological activity that would soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide, and potentially help mitigate climate change. But there are also clear dangers in tinkering with poorly understood global systems. "There is no control experiment for a large scale perturbation of the Earth," said MIT engineer Janelle Thompson. "At what point does a scientific experiment become geoengineering?"