[ed. See also: The First Geo-Vigilante.]
The incident has prompted an investigation by Canadian environmental officials, and in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was misled into providing ocean-monitoring buoys for the project.
The entrepreneur, Russ George, said his team scattered 100 tons of iron dust in mid-July in the Pacific several hundred miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in a $2.5 million project financed by a native Canadian group.
The substance acted as a fertilizer, Mr. George said, fostering the growth of enormous amounts of plankton that were monitored by the team for several months. He said the result could help the project meet what it casts as its top goal: aiding the recovery of the salmon fishery for the native Haida people.
But marine scientists and other experts said the experiment, which they learned about only in news reports this week, was shoddy science, irresponsible and probably in violation of international agreements intended to prevent tampering with ocean ecosystems under the guise of trying to fight the effects of climate change.
While the environmental impact of Mr. George’s foray could well prove minimal, they said, it raises the specter of what they have long feared: rogue field experiments that could upend ecosystems one day put the planet at risk. Mark L. Wells, a marine scientist at the University of Maine, said that what Mr. George’s team did “could be described as ocean dumping.”
Noting that blooms like those that the team observed occur regularly in the region, Dr. Wells said it would be difficult for Mr. George to demonstrate what impact the iron had on the plankton. And Dr. Wells said it was “extraordinarily unlikely” that Mr. George could prove that the experiment met another crucial goal of the project: the permanent removal of some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plankton absorbs carbon dioxide and settles deep in the ocean when it dies, sequestering carbon. The Haida had hoped that by permanently burying carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, they could sell so-called carbon offset credits to companies and make money.
Iron fertilization is contentious because it is associated with geoengineering, a set of proposed strategies for counteracting global warming through the deliberate manipulation of the environment. Many experts have argued that scientists should be researching such geoengineering techniques — like spewing compounds into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or using sophisticated machines to remove carbon dioxide to combat rising temperatures.
by Henry Fountain, NY Times | Read more:
