14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany announced recently that they fully support the proposed action plan for the Southern Ocean, which involves it being sprinkled with several tens of tons of iron, which is supposed to help plankton in the area regenerate and take up more harmful carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Their opinion is refuted by environmentalists, who argue that the long-term effects of this plan have not yet been considered, and that, by going ahead with it, we might be hurting nature, rather than helping it.
Basically, the scheme works as follows – iron particles are spread across vast areas of the ocean, where they enter the water and feed the plankton living there. This stimulates the little animals to take up more carbon dioxide, mostly because of the fact that they drastically increase in numbers. Following their deaths, these creatures fall to the ocean floor, where the carbon they contain will be trapped, with no possibility of it ever returning to the surface.
The process is similar to that occurring during powerful storms, when water spilled in the oceans carries thousands of tons of carbon.
On the other hand, scientific studies conducted by various specialists around the world are most of the time contradictory, so opinions on the matter in the international scientific community are split. And perhaps the largest inconvenience of the new plan is the fact that none of the reports released thus far was able to thoroughly specify exactly what the long-term effects of this measure would be. They only say that the iron stimulates the growth of marine algae and phytoplankton, which trigger a powerful carbon sequestration process when they die.
Unfortunately, some say, there is no foolproof way of figuring out what these effects might be, simply because such a large-scale planet engineering process has never before been conducted. There are numerous problems to be accounted for, including a proper distribution method, as well as finding a way to measure the effects of the plan. Up until this point, the only real way of knowing how we would affect the marine ecosystem is to go ahead with the plan, and then assess its implications.