An expedition to Antarctica reveals that iron supply to the Southern Ocean may have controlled Earth’s climate during past ice ages.
Previous studies have suggested that during the last four ice ages, the Southern Ocean had large phytoplankton populations and received large amounts of iron-rich dust, possibly blown out to sea from expanding desert areas. Each of these blooms consumed over 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide. Observations indicate that much of the carbon sank to hundreds of meters below the surface. This finding suggests that iron fertilization could cause billions of tons of carbon to be removed from the atmosphere each year.
In my opinion this adds very little to what is already known about the absorption of carbon dioxide by phytoplankton. The subject has been discussed many times in New Scientist over the past few years.
The “blooms” mentioned in the story here were artificially produced by the researchers – I hadn’t heard of that actually being done, and measuring the carbon uptake before. Nice work on the mitigation problem!
By the way, shouldn’t the poll say “warming”, not “warning”? Want somebody to fix that?
I clearly remember submitting a poll with the story. What happened to it?
Dude, I detached it from the story and put it on the front page where everybody would see it. Believe me, you’ll get a LOT more votes this way, particularly since readers didn’t have to click to see the rest of your story (and the poll) since it was so short.
I took care of it though :-) – it’s Warming now.
Ricky did this to me once too – a little confusing, but it definitely increased the exposure.
An interesting article. I would have to disagree about it showing us nothing new. Iron is one of the larger limiting factors in the open ocean for phytoplankton. If I remember correctly in the late 90s there was talk about dumping iron into the ocean. I can’t remember if anything ever came of it though. Unforutnately I can’t get to the article to read about it. I’ll have to talk to my Marine Mirco professor about it.