"There are three volcanic events in the last 100 years, and we had record sockeye salmon runs in those three volcanic dust events," George says. "That's pretty good data." In fact, government scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada speculated in a paper published this year in Fisheries Oceanography that the Kasatoshi eruption might be linked to the abundance of returning salmon in 2010.
But other scientists argue salmon biology is more complicated than that. "There's not evidence that that region is iron-limited," argues phytoplankton researcher Maite Maldonado of the University of British Columbia, who sailed on one of the first experimental iron fertilization cruise in the Southern Ocean in 1999. "We have a project right now looking at the salmon, and what we see is not that phytoplankton biomass has changed. What has changed is the timing of when the spring bloom occurs."
Much as migrating birds or spawning insects rely on the timing of spring so that there is enough available food when they arrive in a given region, so, too, the salmon rely on the timing of phytoplankton blooms, followed by the zooplankton bloom that then feeds baby salmon. As the Canadian government scientists note in the Fisheries Oceanography paper: "The 2010 phenomenal run…may forever remain an enigma due to the lack of precise ecological and chemical data."
In the case of the HSRC, however, the participants simply point to what they observed at sea: an influx of sea life, from seabirds to tuna. "More marine life was observed," Chief Councilor Ken Rea of the Old Masset Village Council told the press conference on October 19.
Not geoengineering
The project is also unlikely to bury much if any carbon dioxide for one simple reason: metabolism. As other iron fertilization experiments have shown, it is relatively easy to get plankton to bloom, but it is harder for that bloom to sink to the bottom of the ocean, where it takes CO2 with it. Instead, as suggested by the trickle-up theory of salmon restoration, the plankton tends to get eaten by tiny animals, which are then eaten by larger animals until, ultimately, all or most of the CO2 sucked up by the tiny plants during their photosynthetic life spans finds its way back to the atmosphere in relatively short order.
To bury carbon at sea requires promoting particular species in the bloom, such as diatoms—shelled algae. When these minute silicon-shelled photosynthesizers die, their corpses can overwhelm natural systems and sink to the bottom, as proved by a scientific research cruise in 2004. But dictating the species composition of a plankton bloom and its aftermath remains beyond the ken of marine biology, causing one researcher involved in the successful 2004 effort, marine biologist Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, to call it beyond control at this stage. It remains unclear at this point which particular species bloomed as a result of the HSRC iron release but the team is sending out for analysis more than 10,000 water samples, data the HSRC team says it will share as other iron fertilization experiments have done. A preliminary review of the data collected is expected by November and a full analysis within the next nine months.
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23 Comments
Add CommentPhytoplankton are vital to the sustainability of the planet but the recent experiment off of Haida Gawaii is neither an effective effort to address the CO2 problem or to stimulate salmon growth which in the long term could suffer due to eutrophication of the water column.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science confirms the findings of an earlier Dalhousie University study that the 94 percent of the heat attributable to global warming that is accumulating in the oceans is causing the thermal stratification that is cutting phytoplankton off from their food source and in turn is destroying both the base of the ocean food chain as well as the lungs of the planet.
We already live in a greenhouse that is adding as much as 330 terrawatts of heat to the oceans every year according to a recent NASA study and this heat is what is is causing the damage.
Even if we stopped adding CO2 to the atmosphere immediately this greenhouse will continue to accumulate heat in the oceans for at least a thousand years and the damage will persist and accelerate, whereas many species, including our own may not.
The only way this damage can be reserved is by converting ocean heat to productive use in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics.
Salmon are cold water fish. It stands to reason they are adversely impacted by an overheating ocean.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the main problem with this experiment is seeing that Volcanic eruptions appear to have an effect on phytoplankton or salmon and the test of only iron in the experiment. Why settle on the iron? Even if there was a desire to find out what parts of volcanic dust have what effect, the first experiment should have been with simulated volcanic dust and not just one single part of it. Even assuming there is a cause and effect here, it is more likely all or many components of volcanic dust together have the effect and not a single part of it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not surprised, global warmists do the same. We have a very complex atmosphere and ocean with heat generation from the planet, people and the sun, cooling of space and who knows how many other effects and warmists ignore all of that to settle on just one molecule in the atmosphere as the culprit. So the same ridiculous pseudo science methods are being applied in this experiment. Declare Iron dust is what is doing the work here before even proving that volcanic dust has any effect at all.
Did they even bother to check parts of the ocean which have a more reliable or constant sources of volcanic activity to see if there really is an effect on biology in the area?
There is no way to turn heat into productive use and somehow have an effect of cooling. Yes you could do something to pull heat out of the ocean which would cool the ocean, but the eventual productive use of that energy will result in the heat being put back into the atmosphere. Though it isn't a green house effect causing warming at best it is a moderate effect. The megawatts of heat produced by all life on earth and all human activity is the cause of warming and your transfer of heat out of the ocean would ultimate just move the heat around not eliminate it. It isnt the CO2 from cars causing warming it is the heat exchange at the radiator pumping out 200 degrees worth of heat every second the car operates that is going into the atmosphere causing warming. Multiply this by millions of cars, factories and stoves and you have the heat causing warming and likely being absorbed in the oceans. Not to forget the heat of 7 billion people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour idea is a good one, recovery of the ocean heat back on land at least gets some of the heat being recycled sort of but it wont actually cool anything.
Sounds like the downside is temporary and the upside is very beneficial.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTime for the UN bureaucrats and other governments to encourage the process of finding out what will help the environment instead of using outdated regulations to throw roadblocks in the way of progress and scream that their ox has been gored.
According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, the change in the internal energy of the sub-system (like say the ocean) is the sum of the heat added to the sub-system, less any work done by the sub-system, plus any net chemical energy entering the sub-system.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAccording to a recent NASA study, the average amount of energy the ocean absorbed each year over the period 1993 to 2008 was enough to power nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs for each of the roughly 6.7 billion people on the planet.
This 330 terawatts is about 20 times the total amount of primary energy we consume every year
Richard Smalley estimated a population of 10 billion by the year 2050 will require as much as 60 terawatts to meet its needs, including massive desalination.
To produce this 60 terawatts with either fission or fusion an additional 120 terawatts of waste heat would be produced, most of which would end up in the ocean because they boil water to produce energy which is only a 33 percent efficient process.
With OTEC you would convert 60TW of heat to work and thus end up with 270TW going into the ocean or a gain of 180TW.
Conventional OTEC requires the dumping of 20TW of surface heat to the depths to produce 1TW of power. For 60TW this is 1.2 Peta watts which would overturn the Thermohaline circulation.
I propose a counter-current heat transfer system that recaptures the latent heat of condensation and returns it to the surface. Essentially it turns a hurricane on its head because the hurricane returns most of the heat transferred by the atmospheric heat pipe back to the surface in the form of falling rain.
With such a system you could produce Smalley's 60 TW by extracting 120Th from the surface and dumping 60Th to the depths. This 60Th would produce gentle convection which would return much of the nutrients phyoplankton need to the surface.
If we loose the lungs of the planet and the base of the ocean food-chain we've had it.
We can get all the energy we will ever need from the ocean and at the same time be a boon to phytoplankton.
In response to priddeseren's first comment...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAccording to my Googling, iron fertilization studies have been happening for many decades and there is a lot of prior science. There is no doubt whatsoever that iron is the main ingredient...this is well known in marine science. The question is whether these plankton blooms will improve fish populations or sink carbon.
For those questions, more experimentation is needed. If George is the guy with the equipment and the knowledge to do these experiments, and if more important, he is willing to tune out the yelling of the anti-science crowd, then by all means we should back off and let him do the work.
Chem-Trail part deux
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe scary part about this is if it works on both counts. If it significantly increases fish returns then there will be major commercial incentives to do it everywhere. If this does sink major amounts of carbon and if this does actually cool the planet... well, how are we going to make everyone stop before Canada is covered in glaciers?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI mean... how could we stop every fishing boat in the world leaving port with a hold full of iron-whatever and dumping it out while fishing? If it ultimately made fishing more profitable, and it fed a lot of people... there's no way we could stop it.
We'd end up in some weird climate war where polar nations were burning down forests and dredging up methane deposits trying to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while equatorial nations were dumping all the iron they could get. What a crazy world; there was an old lady that swallowed a fly. Never should have started that agriculture in the first place.
It must be working. It's gotten colder. But, then again, it's gotten colder since 1998,1000, 1 and 8000BC.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum
I proposed this for the growth of seaweed because previous work had shown higher iron water produced certain seaweeds. If seaweed could be induced to grow by this method , kelp makes a decent fertiliser , is eaten as food , potentially feeding the world. This project shows growth , proving at the very least , the 'concept' of ocean fertilisation as a method which could be explored to the benefits of mankind. This "reckless radical scientist" seems to have confirmed a study which one can do in ones head. As he pointed out , it is a drop in the bucket compared to what spews from a volcano.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem is it has been offered as a solution to declining salmon populations. They of course are cold water adapted fish for which this is no solution at all. I too however believe in natural carbon sinks as the solution per www3.telus.net/gwmitigationmethod/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo my mind the deserts are the only terrestrial locations capable of sequestering the amount of water and CO2 we can look forward to. In the process they could provide the food/fuel and fibre a population of 10 billion will require.
As pointed previously, Ocean Iron fertilization has been done repeatedly and unintentionally during several wars: for example, after WWI the Germans sunk their fleet in Stampa Bay before handling it to the Britons, and many USA, UK, French Italian, German and Japanese ships are sunk at different depths in many places of the Mediterranean Sea and of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, including some islands where travelling to is easy. It won't be difficult checking if the lots of Iron coming from sunken ships has had any noticeable effect in the living things in its surroundings, be the effect good or bad. It's a good excuse for visiting atolls and reefs, and get paid for it. First coming, first served!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfixerdave,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour response is appropriate and very true without a doubt but it did make me laugh quite a bit. The truth can be funny.
Thanks!
I wonder if this loss of iron in the water is due to the loss of peat bogs near rivers and streams? The antarctica is the only continent without peat bogs. This is point that has to be driven home again and again. Burns Bog which was just declared a Ramsar site as part of the Fraser Delta Ramsar site, sits at the mouth of the Fraser River which is/was the largest salmon-bearing river in the world. It is becoming so common for the salmon to migrate due to warm water in the summer/fall that it is no longer reported. In spite of one half of Burns Bog being in a Conservation Area and now part of a Ramsar site, the politicians continue to try and find ways to destroy it. First by girdling it with the South Fraser Perimeter Road, now developers are trying to find ways to destroy 89 acres of unprotected Burns Bog (with sights on an even large chuck across the road). People are getting fed up with politicians speaking out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to protecting peatlands. A big bravo to UK politicians who are wrestling with banning the use of peat in gardening. And a "bravo" to Bonny Prince Charles for discontinuing the use of peat in his farming practices since 1987 or 1988.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGuujaaw, president of the Haida Nation, John Disney of Haida Salmon Restoration Corp, Russ George and Alexander Schoppmann at Blue CO2 may be on to something we don't know about, like Earthquake Seeding with Ferric Sulfate (Iron(III) sulfate). A Magnitude 7.7 (Richter Scale) earthquake occurred off Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Island), Saturday, October 27, 2012 at 08:04:10 PM at epicenter on the Queen Charlotte Fault, about four months after the Iron III sulfate seeding from a fishing boat in July of 2012.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjgrosay,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSunken ships are not iron fertilization. The iron is not available for plankton to use. The ships do help to form reefs as coral and other stationary marine life find anchor holds, and fish and other creatures find shelter. So it is an entirely different process.
I think you misread the graph for the recent period. The test notes the recent warming is not included.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo the trend shows over the last 4000 years or so, global temperatures have been slowly declining. This makes the recent (last few hundred years) warming that much more alarming. As at least one researcher noted, we should be heading for the next ice age, not for another warming cycle. (In an article I read in SA around 2008.)
note the pattern in the antartic graph (labeled Ice Age Temperature Changes) covering the last 450 thousand years. Each ice age period is followed by a sharp rise and then gradual decline in temperature. IOW, global temps should be declining, not rising.
Showing that iron dust triggers phytoplankton growth is the only thing that has been proven thus far.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's hardly believable that a man would work for years to perform this experiment and then throw all care to the wind when it comes to doing the scientific needed to back it up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think we should look at all the facts before jumping to the conclusion that this lacks any scientific method. As a scientist, I am eager to learn more about the information they've gathered and if their website is truthful, than they certainly had the right equipment to collect valid scientific data.
http://www.hsrc1.com/blog/
You really need to check your meds there skippy. 110 tons of iron spread over a large area of salt water isn't going to generate a large enough charge or magnetic pull to cause an earth quake. Particularly when it is consumed by a variety of life forms and dissipated over an even larger area by large feeders and currents for 3 months.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA number of ship wrecks have dumped thousands of tons of iron into the oceans in very concentrated spots and not caused earthquakes.
Fixerdave
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFish in oceans have declined very steeply over the past 200 years. Perhaps from about 8 to 14 billion tons to 0.8 to 2 billion tons.
It will take a lot of fertilization to restore the fish population of oceans.
People have been unintentionally fertilizing oceans with millions of tons of many materials since the start of the Industrial revolution -
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFly ash from the coal fired steam ships.
Fly ash from all the thermal power plants.
Ash contains about 3 % iron.
Petroleum that leaks from all the oil tankers and pipelines.
Sewage - treated, partly treated and untreated - pumped out into oceans.
So 100 tons of Iron Sulfate is not a big issue at all.