Artificially Inducing Phytoplankton Blooms Could Lower Carbon Dioxide Levels and Fight Climate Change - The Daily Beast

Some climate researchers believe if we could just slightly increase the amount of carbon the ocean can absorb from the atmosphere, we could avoid some of the worst effects of climate change.

Phytoplankton in the ocean use this carbon dioxide and sunlight to run photosynthesis just like land-based plants.

Some climate researchers have proposed that if we could just increase the amount of phytoplankton in the ocean, we could pull more carbon out of the atmosphere.

A well-known way to produce a phytoplankton bloom is to introduce iron, an important nutrient for the plankton community, to the water.

Many parts of the ocean are low in iron, so even a relatively small addition of iron could theoretically produce a lot of phytoplankton and thereby remove a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But that’s also around the time people started to think about how iron fertilization could affect phytoplankton growth and, in turn, change atmospheric carbon levels.

Using the oceans to combat climate change has become a much-discussed topic among climate scientists in recent years, and Buesseler was part of a group of scientists that released a report through the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine late last year that looked at the available options, including increasing phytoplankton levels.

The experiments themselves wouldn’t cause any harm to the ocean’s natural ecosystem, Buesseler said, but they could tell us a lot about how introducing more iron to the ocean on a much larger scale might affect that ecosystem in the long-term.

But avoiding the worst effects of climate change will require also developing carbon removal strategies to reduce the load of greenhouse gasses in the air