Natural OCDR II — Feeding the Ocean
Out in open water the removal engine shrinks to the microscopic — and becomes the single hardest thing in the field to prove. Part 4 of 7 In Part 3, we stayed at the coast, where you can core a marsh and sample what it stores. Now we head into open water, where the same biological pump runs on a very different engine: phytoplankton — microscopic drifting plants that carry out roughly half of all photosynthesis on Earth. The removal principle is unchanged; only the scale of the organism, and the difficulty of measurement, have flipped. There are two ways to grow more phytoplankton: bring nutrients to them ( fertilization ), or bring them to the nutrients ( artificial upwelling ). Both are conceptually elegant. Both are, in practice, the hardest members of the whole OCDR category to verify. Ocean fertilization: engineering a bloom Microalgae (phytoplankton) cultivation and ocean fertilization — growing the sea's microscopic carbon-catchers. Phytoplankton growth is ...