Controversial US businessman’s iron fertilisation off west coast of Canada contravenes two UN conventions
Source: World’s biggest geoengineering experiment ‘violates’ UN rules | Environment | The Guardian
From comments:
the big question now is “Did it work?” or “Is it working?”
— anonymous
To the best of my current understanding, I’m sure that you can make blooms occur with this or something very similar, depending on location. The issue is what the side-effects and unintended consequences are. This is almost certainly a *terrible* idea anywhere you want to keep sea life alive. Even *if* humanity decided that this were an affordable geoengineering amelioration/sink for CO2, you’d want to use the Black Sea to do it so that the naturally anoxic waters can keep the dead critter corpses longer and so that the sea die-off can be more reliably contained. And we’re not going to see serious side effects for years, potentially (see – the food web bit).
It appears to have produced the immediate intended result (plankton bloom), the success of the intended-intended result (remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for a meaningful amount of time — decades or longer) won’t be known for a long time, and unanticipated side effects might not be visible for a long time or only at larger scales depending on how strongly the local water column is affected by the dump.