A noted oceanographer once quipped that if you gave him a tanker
half-filled with iron, he could give you an ice age. He was only
half-joking.
Adding iron to the ocean can
cause blooms of algae, which have the potential to take huge amounts of
carbon dioxide out of the air and by so doing, cool the planet. And a report in Nature magazine now offers some support for that idea.
The
premise of this experiment is that algae growing in the oceans around
Antarctica can’t grow fast because it’s starved of an essential
nutrient: iron. Victor Smetacek at the Alfred Wegener Institute for
Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, says iron in the
ocean is as precious as water is for plants on the land.
“Where
you have heavy rainfall you have forests, and where you have no
rainfall you have deserts,” he says. “And you have the same thing with
iron falling from the atmosphere on the oceans.”
