Doubts surround carbon absorption project near Galápagos

This month a US company, Planktos Inc., plans to dump 100 tons of iron dust into the ocean near Ecuador's Galápagos Islands, despite opposition from environmental groups and marine scientists. This will be the first-ever commercial effort to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, one of the main gases blamed for climate change, by using iron particles to create a 10,000-square-kilometre "plankton bloom". Planktos says the extra volume of these small, floating organisms will absorb large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and take it deep into the sea. "The currents will likely bring the bloom into the [Galápagos] Marine Reserve," covering 133,000 sq. km, the world's third largest marine reserve, says Washington Tapia, director of the Galápagos National Park, which includes the reserve. "We don't have any idea what will happen... We have tried to contact Planktos to get more information, without success," Tapia told Tierramérica in Puerto Ayora. The 19 islands of the archipelago, located 1,000 km from the Ecuadorian coast, and the surrounding seas are seen as a prime example of natural history, and inspired part of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution after visiting the Galápagos in the 19th century. Ocean carbon sequestration has been tested in several small experiments over the past 20 years. Most have shown that adding iron to ocean waters with an iron deficit"like the Southern Oceans"will promote growth of plankton, which need this nutrient to live. And since the plankton absorb carbon, this boosts the amount of atmospheric carbon taken up by the ocean fauna. However, in choosing the Galápagos for its first large-scale ocean sequestration experiment, Planktos sparked a firestorm of protest. "There's a real risk that this experiment may cause a domino effect through the food chain," said Sallie Chisholm, microbiologist and board member of the World Wildlife Fund, in a statement. The Planktos project "threatens our climate, our marine environment and the sovereignty of our fisherfolk, and it should be stopped," according to Elizabeth Bravo of the Ecuador-based Acción Ecológica. This is the first of six experiments adding iron to oceans that Planktos hopes to carry out over the next two years. The company believes that if plankton were restored to 1980 levels it would annually remove three to four billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, helping to slow global warming five times more effectively than immediate universal compliance with the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which obligates industrialised countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A February 2007 article in "Science" magazine reviewed previous experiments"called iron enrichment or fertilization"between 1993 and 2005. Scientists concluded that large-scale enrichment could affect the planet's climate system and that more study was necessary. "It works"enrichment does remove carbon from the atmosphere. But we do not know how long carbon will be removed," says co-author Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, in California.