The Planktos Incident continues. Just when I thought it had died. Russ George, former head of the defunct Planktos, has decided to, despite the scientific community asking for a more cautious and sensible approach and international moratoriums, dump 100 tons of iron into the ocean. In discussing the DSN core value of Awareness Through Scrutiny, Not Negativity Rick provided a great history of the incident which I provide now slightly edited.
To tell this tale, we need to turn the clock back and dust off a few posts from the Deep Sea News archives, as well as Miriam’s The Oyster’s Garter and Rick’s Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets. Back in 2007 a small California-based start-up, Planktos, began pitching a concept for marine ecosystem restoration, climate change mitigation, and the creation a carbon offset scheme for individuals and businesses.
Planktos planned to triangulate these goals via the artificial fertilization of open-ocean algal blooms. The company proposed mimicking the addition of nutrients that naturally occurs along coastlines through the artificial “seeding” of iron filings into seawater. This concept and proposed methodology presented a means to fix and quite literally sink oceanic and atmospheric carbon dioxide. As an added bonus, it created a carbon offset scheme that could be pitched to potential investors looking for a method to reduce their carbon footprint.
It was a great idea… a beautiful idea. But to quote Thomas Henry Huxley, it was a beautiful hypothesis marred by an ugly fact.
In late 2007, I published a short critique of Planktos’ proposed iron fertilization off the Galapagos Islands. In that post, I posed what I thought were a few unanswered (and not trivial) questions:
“What might a rain of iron filings mean for benthic ocean communities? Where does the iron filing supply come from and what contaminants might it have? And since not all phytoplankton are alike, what happens if you spur on harmful algal blooms. Finally, couldn’t the lure of massive profit potentially taint your research into the efficacy (or threats) from your iron dumping scheme?”
Shortly thereafter, a follow-up post by Dr. M on Deep Sea News pressed Planktos for a response to his own questions regarding their methodology. Dr. M leveled his skepticism at the out-of-sight, yet problematic, seafloor impacts following the dumping of iron filings into the ocean – including the lack of ability to quantify any long-term and downstream effects, potential oxygen depleted conditions of the seafloor below fertilization, enhanced release of nitrous oxide with two hundred times the greenhouse gas potential of carbon dioxide during the decomposition of organisms, and lack of predictability of the amount of carbon dioxide that will actually sink to the seafloor and how long it will be sequestered.
Following this post, Miriam on The Oyster’s Garter leveled a comprehensive dismantling of the science behind the company’s responses to criticism from the scientific community. “I’m appalled Planktos has even gotten off the ground with such poor, nonsensical science,” wrote Miriam back in October of 2007. You should head back to Miriam’s original post as it still stands as a beautiful point-by-point rebuttal of junk science.
With little to no apparent regard for a precautionary approach, Planktos was essentially proposing geoengineering on a massive scale with little to no understanding of the effect of iron fertilization on ocean ecosystems. Shortly after our blog posts raised the level of scrutiny on Planktos’ plans, several international conservation NGOs as well as a few Galapagos-based conservation groups expressed their own concerns over plans to dump iron filings into Galapagos’ waters.
By February 2008, the scrutiny apparently proved to be too much for the start-up. Lacking sufficient capitalization and investor interest, Planktos announced their plans to “indefinitely postpone activities”. It wasn’t too long thereafter that their commercial website was shuttered and the founder issued a statement that, “A highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders has provoked widespread opposition to plankton restoration in the environmental world, and has caused the company to encounter serious difficulty in raising the capital needed to fund its planned series of ocean research trials.”
Now to build on the story of Rick’s great history…
The head of Planktos was Russ George. In 2008, George and Planktos tried to reinvent themselves largely through a make over of the website. As I wrote then…
Is this the wolf in a sheep’s cloths or has Planktos really reinvented themselves? One of the reasons Planktos originally closed-up shop, according to them, was a suite of bad publicity. This bad publicity was of course the scientific community questioning the scientific validity and unexpected outcomes of gross iron fertilization in reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. It appears that Planktos is simply trying to “green” their image. One way of doing this is by now using the term ecorestoration
Our mission is the restoration of damaged habitats in the ocean and on land. By restoring plankton ecosystems in the oceans and growing new forestation projects worldwide, we are able to help mitigate the impacts modern society has on our planet. We engage in active ecorestoration because mere conservation and reduction of our footprint upon the planet will clearly not be sufficient to pass our success as planetary stewards to our children. The harm we have caused this small blue planet must be healed, and it will take a determined and intelligent effort to accomplish this.
Ecorestoration, or restoring plankton ecosystems, is just another way to say ocean iron fertilization. Another quote from the new website that bothers me
Planktos projects restore plankton populations to revive marine ecosystems
However, what specific negative impacts of ocean gross iron fertilization will have both on the ocean’s surface biology but on the deep ocean is largely unknown. The other issue is how much current ocean degradation is actually due to issues that ocean fertilization can mitigate? Probably little.
The new Planktos also claims to solve our ocean fisheries collapse, fuel crisis, ocean acidification, and provide new medicines in addition. The connections between these goals and ocean iron fertilization are tenuous at best.
This post received a response from George himself where he rehashed older arguments and again I questioned the science of iron fertilization. I argued we should not make the situation worse by proceeding with a haphazard plan by a for profit company. Of course, the most prominent physical, biological, and chemical oceanographers published in Science that same year that “It is premature to sell carbon offsets from ocean iron fertilization unless research provides the scientific foundation to evaluate risks and benefits.”
It was agreed by all that this was not the way forward and thankfully we heard little else from Planktos and Russ George. Until now…
George decided to ignore science, the scientific community, and throw caution to the wind. From the Guardian…
A controversial American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada in July…Lawyers, environmentalists and civil society groups are calling it a “blatant violation” of two international moratoria and the news is likely to spark outrage at a United Nations environmental summit taking place in India this week.
Keep in mind that Agenda Item 12 from the US to the London Convention back in 2007 stated concern of Planktos operations in international waters noting that
Planktos, Inc. was not able to provide the EPA with any information relating to an evaluation by the company or by any regulatory body of the potential environmental impacts of their planned iron addition projects, such as:
- the estimated amount and potential impacts of iron that is not taken up by phytoplankton;
- the amounts and potential impacts of other materials that may be released with the iron;
- the estimated amounts and potential impacts of other gases that may be produced by the expected phytoplankton blooms or by bacteria decomposing the dead phytoplankton;
- the estimated extent and potential impacts of deep ocean hypoxia (low oxygen) or anoxia (no oxygen) caused by the bacterial decay of the expected phytoplankton blooms; or
- the types of phytoplankton that are expected to bloom and the potential impacts of any harmful algal blooms that may develop.
In 2008 191 nations agreed to a moratorium on large-scale commercial iron fertilization schemes.
The agreement, adopted on 30 May at a meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Bonn, Germany, calls for a ban on major ocean fertilization projects until scientists better understand the potential risks and benefits of manipulating the oceanic food chain.
Indeed the rules were so stringent it actually had the negative impact of limiting some legitimate scientific research into iron fertilization. But George told the Guardian that the two moratoria are a “mythology” and do not apply to his project.
And so here we are again. Satellite imagery from NASA indicates George triggered an artificial plankton bloom roughly 10,000 square kilometers (see image at the Guardian article) off of British Columbia. This has undoubtedly altered the deep-sea systems below it, but for how long?
George states that
his team of unidentified scientists has been monitoring the results of the biggest ever geoengineering experiment with equipment loaned from US agencies like Nasa and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. He told the Guardian that it is the “most substantial ocean restoration project in history,” and has collected a “greater density and depth of scientific data than ever before”.
Of course call me skeptical that NASA and NOAA had any official role in this as again it is against international law. I also cannot imagine any team of scientists being involved with this either for the same reason…or the baggage that George brings to the table.
Of course the whole event gets even more distasteful. George dumped this off of Haida Gwaii, an archipelago on the North Coast of British Columbia, Canada and home of the indigenous population of Haida. George convinced the Haida to channel more than one million dollars of their own funds into the project that would supposedly benefit the ocean and salmon populations.
The president of the Haida nation, Guujaaw, said the village was told the dump would environmentally benefit the ocean, which is crucial to their livelihood and culture.”The village people voted to support what they were told was a ‘salmon enhancement project’ and would not have agreed if they had been told of any potential negative effects or that it was in breach of an international convention,” Guujaaw said.
So what is the next step? I believe he is culpable of fraud against the Haida and for knowingly breaking international law. He should be held accountable for each of these.
Nothing has changed over the last 3-4 years…iron fertilization is not a viable solution to mitigate climate change, decreasing productivity of the oceans, salmon declines, or anything else except for making iron salesman very happy. In fact iron fertilization actually causes the reverse…an unhealthier ocean in ways both envisioned and not.