Fil

... iron fertilisation could potentially sequester as much as 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, and keep it deep in the ocean for centuries. That is slightly more than the CO2 output of the German economy, and roughly one-eighth of humanity’s entire greenhouse gas output.

[...]

Fertilising the waters could promote blooms that help sea life thrive all the way up the food chain, even to whale populations, which are still recovering from overhunting. And, more importantly, the uneaten plankton could suck out CO2 from the air until they die and sink to the sea floor, burying the carbon with them.

[...]

Environmental activists stoked fears about unknown side effects. Some worried the iron could lead to a toxic algal bloom, like those that have poisoned sea lions and other sea life off the coast of California. Others floated the possibility that the experiment could lead to a dead zone, like the one created each summer by the algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico [...].

In the wake of Russ George’s rogue geoengineering in 2002, the world’s governments agreed via the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in May 2008 that iron fertilisation should be forbidden ‘until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities’.

But Smetacek’s research cruise already demonstrated that iron fertilisation works, and the science behind it has been vetted and published in the journal Nature, as recently as 2012. Despite this progress, there have been no scientific research cruises since 2009, and there are none planned for the future. At the very moment it revealed its promise, the white whale of iron fertilisation seems to have slipped under the waves anew.

Il me semble en effet que les baisses subséquentes du pH et de la teneur en oxygène peuvent avoir quelques effets sur les écosystèmes.