Could this really work?

[warrior1]

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/821934.html



S.F. entrepreneur floats a bold idea to 'fertilize' ocean
Sees ocean 'fertilized' with iron as a tool to slow climate change.
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg -

Dan Whaley wants to change your world.

Right at the edge between hopeful and scary, this San Francisco entrepreneur wants to fight global warming by altering the oceans.

Whaley hopes to sell carbon credits for "ocean fertilization," a plan that mixes big money and big science so ambitiously that some researchers fear we would never fully understand what we'd done.

Sometime this year, Whaley's company Climos expects to seek permits to drizzle an iron slurry over roughly 4,000 square miles of ocean.

In its wake, a green film of phytoplankton would bloom, absorb carbon dioxide, and fade, either naturally or as some other creature's meal. As waste and decomposing fragments from this eruption of life drift downward, carrying their internal carbon with them, some could sink deeply enough to be sequestered for 100 years or more, potentially slowing down global warming.

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[TZ]

1. I don't know, in theory perhaps

But I'd be really wary of messing with the ocean's ecosystems. A project this large scale is bound to have all sorts of unpredictable variables, which could potentially not only cause it not to work, but really do damage.
You should post this in the science forum. There are some people there who are much more familiar with the scientific principles behind this than me...

[mike_c]

2. it has been proposed and modeled....

But the amount of carbon that can be sequestered this way is uncertain, but unlikely to make much of a dent in fossil fuel carbon, IMO. Further, the history of outcomes from marine nutrient enrichment isn't good.