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POPSUrea 'climate solution' may backfire Similar to the idea of seeding the ocean with iron, the project is being seen as a way of generating 'carbon credits' Independent scientists have called for further research, however the biggest hurdle seen by the companies seems to be arranging the approval of various national governments. I remember W.C Fields mentioning something about not drinking water because of fish urine. It's a wonder they need more. There is also significant runoff from fertilizer containing nitrates, ending up in the ocean. The company says it is researching but wants to protect 'intellectual property' Natural upswellings of nitrogen have been known to produce toxic blooms, and nitrous oxide, a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2
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POPSEarth From Space: A Blooming North Sea MERIS acquired this image on 7 May 2008, working in Full Resolution mode to provide a spatial resolution of 300 m. Globally, phytoplankton are a major influence on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and hence need to be modelled into calculations of future climate change. Just like land-based plants, they accumulate carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and store it in their tissues, making them potentially important carbon sinks. To support ocean carbon cycle research, ESA's GlobColour project has merged 55 terabytes of data from three state-of-the-art instruments aboard different satellites, including MERIS, MODIS aboard NASA's Aqua and SeaWiFS aboard GeoEye's Orbview-2, to produce a 10-year dataset of global ocean colour stretching from 1997 to 2007. The ocean colour datasets are freely available to the public via the GlobColour website.
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POPSOutlook for Oceans Bleak as Sea 'Deserts' Grow Link to Global Warming And it seems to be tied to global warming. Polovina's study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, finds that the areas of low productivity are expanding in lockstep with increasing water temperatures. As surface temperatures warm, that prevents colder water from rising up from the depths. And that colder water carries the nutrients that would feed the algae. Scientists studying climate change have predicted this kind of change. But the sea desert has been spreading 10 times faster than climate scientists predicted.So Polovina is a bit cautious — this could be a shorter-term fluctuation, not a permanent change. "In the next 10 years, maybe it could switch back," he says. "Until we get a much longer time series, we don't know."
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