Word: plankton
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...says holidays are about getting brown? For kids, getting greener can be far more fun. After a day of snorkeling, kayaking and exploring tide pools, six young marine detectives gleefully examine their findings - plankton, sea tomatoes and some seagrass - under high-tech microscopes. These aquatic adventurers are members of Ambassadors of the Environment, the children's club at the eco-luxury Cape Sounio hotel on mainland Greece's Attica coast. Aimed at kids between 4 and 12, the club is part of a far-reaching educational scheme devised by marine biologist Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of ocean pioneer Jacques...
...reasons the oceans soak up so much carbon is that phytoplankton--microscopic floating plants--love it, feasting on it and taking it out of circulation. The problem is, there are vast regions where the water is iron poor and plankton languish. The amount of iron the plants need and aren't getting is tiny--less than 20 lb. per sq. mi. (3 kg per sq km) by some estimates. If this were pumped as a diluted slurry into the wake of a ship steaming back and forth like a tractor seeding a field, the plankton would bloom and global...
Sometime next year, a California start-up called Climos plans to experiment with the technique, fertilizing about 4,000 sq. mi. (about 10,000 sq km) of ocean. The goal is not to prove that the iron makes the plankton grow but to determine how much carbon this takes out of the atmosphere and for how long. "When we add iron, we create plankton blooms," says oceanographer Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who led an earlier, smaller iron-seeding test, "but a lot of that just dies and decomposes" at the surface. Only when organic matter snows...
Another part of that portfolio could focus on a component of the ocean far more plentiful than its plankton: its salt. Sea salt, like table salt, is made of sodium chloride. If you break that compound in two, you create an acid and a base. Remove some of the acid, and you change ocean chemistry in such a way that atmospheric CO2 dissolves into the water, where it is taken up in the shells of marine creatures, which fall to the seafloor and become limestone. Essentially, says Kurt House, a Harvard graduate student who came up with the idea when...
...Australian Bight, south over the continental shelf and then west and north, around Western Australia and up to their spawning grounds near the Timor Sea. They've now spawned three times and produced eggs and larvae. The next step is to feed the millions of larvae the right plankton so they develop into tiny fish, eventually to be farmed in offshore pens. "Out of 10 steps, we're probably at No. 3 or 4," says Mike Thomson, Clean Seas' research and development manager. The company says it's prepared to spend another $100 million to reach its goal...