Ocean test to fight global warming fails
Amit Bhattacharya | TNN
New Delhi: LOHAFEX, the Indo-German Antarctic scientific expedition that had triggered a storm of protests when it set sail in January to test a controversial method of fighting global warming by getting a huge amount of CO ² to sink deep into the ocean, has returned with disappointing results.
The team found that the amount of CO ² —a greenhouse gas chiefly responsible for global warming—eliminated from the atmosphere as a result of the experiment turned out to be far less then expected. This has led the scientists, 29 of them from India, to infer that the Southern Ocean near Antarctica may not be as good a site for ‘ocean iron fertilization’ as previously thought.
Iron fertilization is a method of seeding the ocean with iron to prompt the blooming of phytoplankton, a class of tiny plant algae which take up CO ² from the air and quickly die off, sinking deep into the ocean with the carbon. If conducted on a large scale, it was touted as a way of sucking millions of tonnes of CO ² , thus reducing the level of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The LOHAFEX team, however, found that though the algae mass doubled in size after four tonnes of dissolved iron was dropped in a 300 sq km patch of ocean, most of it was quickly eaten away by a crustacean zooplankton species. ‘‘This grazing resulted in most of the CO ² trapped by algae to be recycled into air,’’ said S W A Naqwi from National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, the co-chief scientist of the project.
Funny feeling I get - A few days ago, I had written about the one straw revolution, and how science cannot see all parameters. This article is another embodiment of that observation.
1 comment:
Interesting blog! Like how you said "You feel like you've met the author in a part of you", I'm right now feeling like I've met a part of myself in your writings :)
btw, I'm in Bangalore too - running in the rat race and showing all signs of exiting the rat race... ;) I've bought a small patch of land in Thanjavur and am trying everything I can to live a less complicated lifestyle.
Talking of global warming, have you heard about 'peak oil'?
Whether people like it or not, as global petroleum supplies dwindle, the Roomba-is-good and fertilizers-are-good community will eventually have to start living a simpler life, whether they do it by choice after realizing the importance of oil in our modern industrial society or whether they're dragged away. The choice is upto every one.
... and like Fukuoka mentions, life won't be easy, sure. Happiness is subjective, afterall.
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