Who seeds the iron, harvests problems perhaps
By Denis Delbecq • December 15th, 2008 in 21:22 · Category: Actuality
While the European Union had to soften its "packet-climate" to satisfy all States, the techniques of géo-engineering of climate appear more and more as an appeal to struggle against climatic warming. But in Australia, a report of the co-operative Research centre on Antarctic climate and ecosystem (ACE-CRC) casts doubt on the fertilization of the oceans. A technology which could certainly pump some carbon in the atmosphere to bury it in the bottom of the oceans, but at the risk of unsettling ecosystems in an irreversible way.
Is it possible to avoid an uncontrollable climatic warming? Ideas do not miss in the scientific laboratories and even in start-ups. Since about twenty years, some researchers plan very seriously to fertilise some oceans to dope the growth of the plankton. To grow, this one pumps some carbon dioxide in water, and at the rebound in air. In its death, the skeleton planctonique runs in the bottom of the ocean, taking with him the carbon collected in the course of his life. Where from the idea of pouring nutritious substances out into regions where the plankton is not much concentrated. In Antarctic waters, for example.
The first experiments, a dozen in total, were driven with the aid of iron. A way to imitate a natural process which disperses big quantities of dusts of the metal since deserts towards the ocean. Firms created, who hope to sell, by doping the plankton, rights of programme of carbon dioxide in exchange for the carbon pumped and trapped in the oceans. At the beginning of the year on 2008, the Convention of the United Nations on biodiversity had issued serious doubts on this concept. Because jobs showed that the capture of carbon is relatively not very efficient, and that iron dispersion can change the ecosystem.
The report of ACE-CRC should be published in some days. But the Reuters news agency could read it forward the first one. «The fertilization of the oceans could cause modifications in has structure of ecosystems and credit of other undesirable effects», write the authors. The Australian organism, which participated in several experiments on fertilization, determines that iron dispersion causes a planctonique growth, but that there is an uncertainty on its role of trap with long-term carbon. What should not prevent from making large-scale experiments, underlines Dan Whaley, the boss of Climos, a Californian business company which casts a trial campaign in the southern ocean in 2010. Questioned by Reuters, he thinks that she should concern a zone of two hundred kilometres in diameters (about 31000 square kilometres).
Among the main reproaches made in fertilization, ACE-CRC underlines that she could, in the best of cases, to sequestrate a thousand million tons of carbon every year, that is only atmospheric 15 % of programme caused by human activities. The Australian research centre recommends to intensify studies on side effects of the fertlisation.
It does not prevent another company, Australian that one, from envisaging large-scale experiments. Ocean Nourishment, founded by the researcher Ian Jones, works on another substance, urea, available in big quantities. He pretends to pump the carbon at the same time and, by the dope of the plankton, to favour the supplies of fish and to reinforce the food security of the planet. An argument taken back also by Planktos Science, another created American firm some months ago on ashes of first one start-up, Planktos. She maintains that fertilization would allow passage to struggle against the effects of the acidification of the oceans, linked to a too strong absorption of carbon dioxide.
Picture: The plankton seen by the satellite SeaWiFS of Nasa during experience a PARTY on the dope of the plankton in 2000 © Nasa
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