Ideas involving global-scale geoengineering projects aimed at sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere have already faced their share of criticism, but new research on one such idea, ocean iron fertilization, suggests yet another question: Do we want to geoengineer flocks of killer birds run amok -- the kind made famous by Alfred Hitchcock?
This is clearly taking things to extremes, but a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that seeding the ocean with iron results in blooms of tiny organisms called phytoplankton that harbor high levels of a toxin known as domoic acid. Although harmless to the phytoplankton—and in fact, it helps them out-compete other
species—domoic acid eventually finds its way into birds and mammals, where it accumulates in the brain and can cause dizziness, disorientation and eventually death.
It has long been speculated that the mass die-off of sea birds that Hitchcock witnessed along the California coast, inspiring his 1963 classic movie, could have been the result of just such a phytoplankton bloom and resultant domoic acid poisoning among the birds.
“I worry about using the ocean as a technical solution for human behavior,” said the study’s lead author, Charles Trick, of the University of Western Ontario. “I think it’s a slippery slope and not a very wise one.”
The idea of iron fertilization as a way of soaking up the excess CO2 in the atmosphere dates from the late 1980s, when oceanographer John Martin famously quipped “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.” Adding iron to the ocean can stimulate the rapid bloom of algae, and these tiny organisms can absorb CO2.
Such blooms happen naturally along coastlines, but Trick said it had previously been assumed that the types of organisms present farther out in the open ocean would not build up the toxins after iron fertilization. In his study, which he stressed was a collaboration between ...
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