3 Iron fertilization

[@LenGJR1]

And I appreciate have educated individuals like yourself contributing to the knowledge base available to the worldwide public. I have any formal scientific training so pardon me if my question has no basis in fact. My question is why doesn't oxygen levels go up when CO2 is being removed? It would seem that if both are present. And one element is reduced then there would be more of the other. Why isn't that the case? Thank you for your consideration of my question.

[@RaghuMurtugudde]

Questions are always important. Oxygen levels have been dropping slightly because we are burning so many things. As CO2 emission is reduced by burning less, oxygen levels will indeed recover. The complexity is that the oceans also have oxygen and they are losing some their oxygen because warmer oceans hold less oxygen. But oxygen is in such high concentration that the changes are small.

[@tiakumar333]

thank you sir👏🏻

[@RaghuMurtugudde]

Glad that they help. Feel free to share. Thank you and best.

[@drainmonkeys385]

I’ve been watching videos about this lately… I’m wondering why.. in the world we live in with all the glamor about climate change,, which is mostly political and self serving on behalf of those Screaning about it… But why are we not fertilizing patches of the ocean .. surely there are areas where this would be beneficial and could expand habitable areas

[@RaghuMurtugudde]

Iron fertilization has been tried by different countries in different locations and the results have been mixed. The new bloom induced by iron addition has to sink to the bottom for carbon to be removed but this is not always guaranteed to happen for various reasons. So more experiments are planned by various countries again in different regions. Ocean CO2 removal is a broader subject now and you can see my other podcasts on those techniques. Thank you.

[@Rene-uz3eb]

I think people are making up random hypotheses for side effects (the useless species for the food chain are exactly the ones needing little iron like green blue algae) when it's pretty clear this is the actual carbon sequestration of the planet in a nutshell with iron as the driver. Humans are responsible for throttling that pump (and life of the ocean) by sequestering probably 90% of the natural iron flow into the ocean from rivers by diverting 50% of water to agriculture and otherwise reducing sediments via hydropower etc. So the least we could do is restore balance and the sequestration pump by fertilization (and actually fishing is probably much less co2 intensive than agriculture so there's another plus). That being said, I doubt natural sequestration is fast enough to make a dent in what we have done. Back of the envelope, the ocean had to deal with 0.25 gt co2 yearly or so from vulcanic activity, and if the pump had been much faster we would not have any co2 in the atmosphere. And that was with abundant ocean life. So that's a far cry from the 1500 gt or so we put up there cumulatively or 35 gt yearly.

[@RaghuMurtugudde]

Iron fertilization has to result in actual export of carbon and that hasn’t been as successful so far as one expects. It’s a bit like cloud seeding. There are more experiments planned and more results will come in but scalability is definitely an issue either way. Blue carbon and other approaches have to add to the portfolio of ocean carbon drawdown. Thanks.