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In this youtube video American entrepreneur Russ George claims that - based on research of oceanographer John Martin and some experiments he made in British Columbia - pouring mineral dust into the ocean will make the plankton bloom and in turn it will allow the ocean to remove the vast majority of humanity carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He says that the amount of mineral dust (iron ore rock dust) required is in the order of the hundreds of thousands of tons.

He claims that this process will mitigate climate change in a matter of years and it will cost some millions of dollars. He says that this process (that he calls 'Ocean pasture restoration') is capable to pull 30/35 billions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year while humanity produces 45 billions of tons of carbon dioxide de every year.

Is this a real solution to climate change as this person claims or not?

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Natural carbon sedimentation rates are - compared to fossil fuel emissions - very low, around 1/1000th, therefore must be increased a thousand fold to send enough Carbon to sediments to compensate for emissions. Ocean fertilization does not automatically lead to greater sedimentation as the organisms that benefit become part of the greater ocean food chain. Some increase in ocean biomass may use some of the CO2 that is dissolved in oceans but it is not clear how ocean biology will respond, nor how such an increase would become irreversible.

Note the relative amounts - 9.3 Petagrams per year (2017) of FF emissions versus 0.01 Petagrams of Burial to Sediments - The Carbon Cycle

Reducing emissions by building an abundance of low emissions energy appears to be the most effective - and cost effective - way to mitigate global warming.

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This concept would be tantamount to fertilising the oceans. Yes you can do this, as a result there would be so much primary producers that when they decompose all the O2 is pulled out of the oceans (mass extinction occurs). When there is no more O2, the primary producers sink to the bottom of the ocean with the bound CO2. So in the long run this would lower the CO2 level but the consequences of this method would be a mass extinction. I could not imagine a way to control this as a human being.

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    $\begingroup$ If I am correct this is called eutrophication. Is there no way to engineer this process in order to prevent the depletion of oxygen? I guess this is common in lakes, but the ocean is quite a big thing,, how does the size of the body of water matter? I read on the Wikipedia page of John Martin his quote: “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.” Was he just a charlatan? Do we need to discard this as an extremely dangerous and ineffective climate technology or it is worth to try something out keeping in mind the consequences of unmitigated climate change? $\endgroup$
    – holmes
    Commented Aug 12, 2022 at 11:53
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    $\begingroup$ @holmes The real issue is that iron is only part of the equation. Adding iron only helps in areas where iron is the limiting nutrient in the ecosystem; that is, plankton need a variety of nutrients, and just adding one won't help if others are missing. Speaking of ecosystems, plankton are also part of an ecosystem; if you produce more plankton, over longer timescales other organisms eat the plankton and return its constituents into the environment; the plankton don't just die and carry their carbon into the depths of the ocean. $\endgroup$
    – jeffronicus
    Commented Aug 12, 2022 at 15:49
  • $\begingroup$ I see that in your comment you follow a different line from your answer, you don't talk about the dangers but about the lack of efficacy of this method. This make me think that there should more research and study on this process to carefully evaluate all the possibilities. If this process is capable of even a minimal mitigation of climate change this should be assessed thoroughly. $\endgroup$
    – holmes
    Commented Aug 13, 2022 at 9:52

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