CDR: Arctic phytoplankton - Nature's little geoengineers?

[Rau, Greg]

Guess I'd be a little more cautious about these observations being a good thing. If widespread: organic loading at depth, anoxia, NOx and CH4 generation? - G

NASA: Increase in CO2 could indirectly lessen effects of global warming

The Capitol Column | Saturday, June 09, 2012

Turns out that increased amounts of phytoplankton could actually help the planet stave off the effects of global warming.

That is the consensus of a team of NASA scientists, according to a newly published report, which finds that a growing body of microscopic plants may eventually provide the Arctic ice with additional time.

NASA researchers say microscopic plants could serve as a solution to increasingly high rates of CO2, one of the key contributors to global warming. The team of scientists suggest that the large quantities of phytoplankton, recently discovered growing under sea ice, could pull in large amounts of the greenhouse gas, possibly curtailing any potential consequences of global warming.

The report finds that the microscopic plants, commonly known as phytoplankton, are actively growing under the thinning Arctic ice, leading scientists to say that the phytoplankton growth in the Arctic may now be richer than any other ocean region on Earth. The large patch of phytoplankton was previously unknown to scientists and it remains unclear whether the bloom existed before the ice began to thin, or it is simply the result of the thinning ice.

“Consequently, current estimates of pan-Arctic primary productivity assume that the growth and biomass of phytoplankton, free-floating single-celled photosynthetic organisms at the base of the marine food web, are negligible in waters beneath ice because of insufficient light,” the scientists explained in the report published Friday.

The team said the finding was highly unexpected and it will likely warrant further research in the coming months and years. The team noted that large swaths of Phytoplankton have often bloomed in the Arctic, but not to this extent. The team of scientists noted that the blooms have been observed to peak as many as 50 days earlier than they did a dozen years ago, a development that could have implications for the larger food web, scientists say.

“My concern is that if phytoplankton continue to develop and grow earlier and earlier in the year, it is going to become increasingly difficult for those animals that time their life cycle to be in the Arctic… to be there at the right time of year,” said Kevin Arrigo of Stanford University, leader of the mission and lead author of the new study.

“If someone had asked me before the expedition whether we would see under-ice blooms, I would have told them it was impossible,” he added. “This discovery was a complete surprise.”

Known formally as “Impacts of Climate on Ecosystems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment,” or ICESCAPE, mission scientists went on two expeditions in June-July of 2010 and 2011. The mission is the latest backed by NASA, which has increasingly focused on studying the effects of global warming and climate change.

The mission, funded in part by NASA, combines field-based observations of Arctic Ocean biology and biogeochemistry with state-of-the-art satellite remote sensing and numerical modeling activities. Together, these three approaches afford the potential to substantially broaden an understanding of Arctic Ocean ecosystems, say researchers.

ICESCAPE is thought to add critical new insights into the optical properties of the sea ice and upper ocean as well as into rates of biogeochemical transformations within the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles. Moreover, it will add significantly to the currently sparse datasets that are sorely needed to develop improved algorithms for detecting ecosystem changes in both the sea ice and the open ocean and for developing improved models.

The plants are thriving in part because the Arctic sea ice has been thinning for years, a result of global climate change, Arrigo said. Melted ice water that pools atop the thin ice sheet make it easier for sunlight to penetrate into the water, stimulating the growth of the phytoplankton. In the Chukchi Sea, essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphates and trace elements are abundant for the rapidly multiplying plants, Mr. Arrigo said.

While the results of the study are likely alarming for climate scientists, the team noted that the presence of the plants could ultimately lead to a thriving fishing industry and additional benefits. Various species of phytoplankton form the crucial diet for many marine organisms and some whales. They make up the base of the entire Arctic food chain, supporting fish, walrus, seabirds, which feed the sparse populations in the region.

The startling findings, made last July during a cruise of the NASA-sponsored ICESCAPE research project, overturn biological expectations about what might be driving the frigid ecosystem that surrounds the disintegrating ice pack every spring, say researchers. The results of the study could further complicate the international response to the threat poised by global warming, which has divided both the scientific community and the policy makers worldwide.



Read more: http://www.capitolcolumn.com/news/nasa-increase-in-co2-could-indirectly-lessen-effects-of-global-warming/#ixzz1xQYucEIn

[Robert Tulip]

This observation of increased algae growth in the Arctic illustrates the key role of algae for both carbon dioxide removal, soaking up our excess emissions, and for solar radiation management, understood more broadly as reducing the amount of heat entering earth systems.

 

If we could manage the algae growth process industrially, manufacturing broadscale systems for rapid controlled surface algae growth in the Arctic Ocean in summer, it would cool the entire polar system and produce a feedback loop to slow the melting of sea ice and the ecological changes we are causing through global warming.

 

Robert Tulip

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[Andrew Lockley]

I fear we don't understand algae well, and it has the capacity to introduce significant errors into our models. 

One of the issues which particularly concerns me is the lack of quantitative treatment of the impact on albedo from algae. 

Whether the manipulation of algal blooms is natural or anthropogenic, there remains a need to quantify the effect on radiation balance.  The carbon cycle effects of algal geoengineering seem to have been analyzed reasonably well (although uncertainty remains over the flux of carbon to benthic sinks).

However, the albedo effects of both natural and geoengineered algal blooms appear to be poorly constrained.

Does anyone know of any climate models which routinely incorporate ocean albedo into a vegetation-coupled model? AFAIK, vegetation modeling is limited generally to land ecosystems.

More generally, I'm concerned by weak modelling of future ocean ecosystems in climate models.  I can't recall ever having come across a climate model which calculates and states consideration of ocean albedo, nor which models carbon flux to the deep ocean in response to temperature changes.

Am I right to be concerned, or am I just ignorant of the literature?

A

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[Russell Seitz]

Despite their spectacular visibility, Arctic blooms absorb light as well as backscattering it in ways more complex than microbubbles.

It is by no means clear what water temperature changes the interplay of backscattering, undershine, and evolving population density will yield, for dissolved  rganic matter and suspended metabolic debris levels vary from organism to organism let alone ecosystem to ecosystem. 

One hopes multlspectral and hyperspectral imaging will yield some correlations soon.

[Nathan Currier]

In terms of nature's little geoengineers, and hoped-for negative feedbacks in the arctic, there might also be some neighborly "natural SRM" 

going on under the arctic ice alongside the "natural CDR" described in this posting. At Los Alamos there's been some interesting modeling of sea-ice edge biochemistry that predicts a rise in DMS-produced cooling with ice break-up. I'd have to check, but it was a non-negligible figure in locally averaged W/m2 - maybe 6 or 7, if memory serves......the hero would appear to be Nitzschia Frigida, an edge/bottom-ice-dwelling diatom that puts out plenty of DMS for several weeks of the spring/early summer.....

On the other hand, like Vernadsky saying long ago that eHux and such could circle the globe in a few days through its reproduction rate, 

biotic potential usually far outstrips performance. 

That will probably stand for the human geoengineers, too, of course. But maybe if both work together? 

Cheers, 

Nathan

[rongre...@comcast.net]

Russell and list:

    In my just-sent message on a new Geo-engineering overview summary e-book, I meant to add that author Risto Isomaki had not included "Bright Water."   (Too new in the technical literature for a book that was updated in early 2011). But there is a section there on the albedo differences of algae.

   My question on arctic algae blooms:   I wonder if there is any economic possibility of harvesting the algae for energy and improved sequestration (CDR) purposes?   (I found reference to a doubling time of 1 day)

   It took me quite a while to find the pertinent "technical" article on which the many popular press reports on Arctic phytoplankton were based.  It appeared in last week's Science: 
    http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/06/06/science.1215065.full

  There is also a helpful intro to this very short article by Stanford's Dr. Arrigo, in a recent ScienceNow short section (with videos) found at:
       http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/06/life-blooms-under-arctic-ice.html

  I still think there should be more of a technical report somewhere - as this seems to be a closed out project.  Anyone?

Ron

---

From: "Russell Seitz" <russel...@gmail.com>
To: geoengi...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2012 8:16:07 AM
Subject: Re: [geo] CDR: Arctic phytoplankton - Nature's little geoengineers?

Despite their spectacular visibility, Arctic blooms absorb light as well as backscattering it in ways more complex than microbubbles.

It is by no means clear what water temperature changes the interplay of backscattering, undershine, and evolving population density will yield, for dissolved  rganic matter and suspended metabolic debris levels vary from organism to organism let alone ecosystem to ecosystem. 

One hopes multlspectral and hyperspectral imaging will yield some correlations soon.

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[Charlie Zender]

> Am I right to be concerned, or am I just ignorant of the literature?

Regarding ocean albedo: I think this is true.

The state-of-the-art ocean (CMIP5) climate models of which I am aware

prescribe ocean albedo based on wavelength, zenith angle, and the

direct/diffuse distinction, and neglect explicit dependence on biology

and wind-speed (whitecaps/foam). However, biology (in terms of

predicted chlorphyll concentration) is explicitly used to determine

the penetration depth of radiation, which influences upper ocean

stability.  

On the other hand, most current ocean climate models include a 

biogeochemical component that explicitly represents carbon pools and

fluxes to the deep ocean.

As to whether there is reason to be concerned about these model

limitations, it's likely that part of the blooms vs. no-blooms albedo

effect is implicitly accounted for in the empirical data on which the

employed parameterizations are based. That said, I think it's worth

investigating whether "climatological" blooms could cause a

non-negligible bias in the prescribed albedo. In my opinion it's more

likely that neglect of the net effects wavy ocean surfaces on longwave

emissivity are larger than shortwave effects of bloom albedo. But they

are two entirely different effects which both should be addressed.

Charlie

[Mike MacCracken]

Ron--Regarding the possibility of encouraging and harvesting algae for energy, the key limitation is having the necessary nutrients—and, in addition, the nutrients would really need to be nutrients not used otherwise by the marine food system to avoid having undesired impacts. So, there are limits (as with iron fertilization) unless one adds the nutrients or brings them up from the deep ocean.

Mike

On 6/11/12 6:17 PM, "rongre...@comcast.net" <rongre...@comcast.net> wrote:

[Robert Tulip]

The Economist Magazine has a special report this week on the warming of the Arctic Ocean.

The report is available at http://www.economist.com/node/21556798 and is highly informative.

 Originally Posted by The Economist

"A heat map of the world, colour-coded for temperature change, shows the Arctic in sizzling maroon. Since 1951 it has warmed roughly twice as much as the global average. In that period the temperature in Greenland has gone up by 1.5°C, compared with around 0.7°C globally. This disparity is expected to continue. A 2°C increase in global temperatures—which appears inevitable as greenhouse-gas emissions soar—would mean Arctic warming of 3-6°C.

Almost all Arctic glaciers have receded. The area of Arctic land covered by snow in early summer has shrunk by almost a fifth since 1966. But it is the Arctic Ocean that is most changed. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s the minimum extent of polar pack ice fell by around 8% per decade. Then, in 2007, the sea ice crashed, melting to a summer minimum of 4.3m sq km (1.7m square miles), close to half the average for the 1960s and 24% below the previous minimum, set in 2005. This left the north-west passage, a sea lane through Canada’s 36,000-island Arctic Archipelago, ice-free for the first time in memory.

Scientists, scrambling to explain this, found that in 2007 every natural variation, including warm weather, clear skies and warm currents, had lined up to reinforce the seasonal melt. But last year there was no such remarkable coincidence: it was as normal as the Arctic gets these days. And the sea ice still shrank to almost the same extent.

There is no serious doubt about the basic cause of the warming. It is, in the Arctic as everywhere, the result of an increase in heat-trapping atmospheric gases, mainly carbon dioxide released when fossil fuels are burned. Because the atmosphere is shedding less solar heat, it is warming—a physical effect predicted back in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist. But why is the Arctic warming faster than other places?" more

 

This excellent report prompted me to formulate the following idea.

Geoengineering the climate can focus on cooling the Arctic Ocean in order to slow the ice melt and increase albedo, reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space. One potentially commercial method to achieve this goal is to float large sheets of reflective plastic just below the ocean surface, released from Norway into the Gulf Stream. The design would aim to optimise algae and fish growth, using wave energy to raise deep nutrient-rich water to the surface in 'Lovelock Tubes', and spreading this rich water across the surface sheet to mimic the upwelling of currents that are the source of the richest fisheries. This method would cool the surrounding water, reducing the heat input that is melting the sea ice. The systems would attract and feed fish with naturally produced algae, serving as efficient fish farms. They would float along the Gulf Stream as shown at Arctic Currents into the Barents Sea, where produced fish could be harvested. Small initial prototypes would identify design issues for potential scale up. The primary natural geoengineering impact would be entirely ecologically beneficial, cooling the Arctic Ocean to delay the risk of catastrophic warming.   

 

Robert Tulip

[RAU greg]

Thanks, Robert.  Interesting indeed, including the 85 comments at the end of the article. As for saving the Arctic, if we float stuff out there, won't that block the light for the algae? If we wave-pump water up from the depths, won't that also bring up more CO2?  What happens to the pumps in the winter - ice, no waves? We hire the locals to haul them in? And who pays? Anyway, funding aside, I would suggest running this by a few oceanographers before launching. 

As for why we don't have any effective policies that would support saving the Arctic or the planet, I can highly recommend a book I just finished; Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway.  Really impressive how a well funded, tiny minority can neutralize scientific evidence, and paralyze policy and action on a whole range of issues. The term "intellectual terrorism" comes to mind, but I digress. 

Keep us posted on your progress,

Greg 

---

From: Robert Tulip <rtuli...@yahoo.com.au>
To: "geoengi...@googlegroups.com" <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Mon, June 18, 2012 6:10:43 PM
Subject: Re: [geo] CDR: Arctic phytoplankton - Nature's little geoengineers?

--

[Gregory Benford]

I echo Greg Rau's comments. Good idea to do something, but plastic? Really?

I looked at this in 2005 and wrote a piece on aerosol screening the Arctic ("Saving the Arctic," attached in its pop version). I encouraged Ken Caldiera & others to do a simulation. It seems to work pretty well.

The cost is ~$200 to $300 million/year, deployed by existing (though modified) KC-10 refueling craft, which are about to be replaced by a fancier upgrade and thus will be even cheaper to buy.

Aerosols have none of the side effects Greg mentions, though they may have others. We could do this NOW--my main point then.

Alas, we suffer in the hands of a largely incompetent government which could protect its simple national interests (& those of the Inuit etc) by acting. But the executive (which could do this by direct order, since it's already a national defense issue) is distracted. Though the president's science advisor is John Holdren, whom I worked with as a postdoc at Livermore, little gets done on such issues.

But the environment doesn't care about politics. Never has.

Gregory Benford

[Robert Tulip]

Thanks Gregory and Greg, good comments and links.  There are obviously many oceanographic and other scientific issues here - I would welcome expert comment.

 

My interest in floating plastic systems for industrial algae production at sea arises from efforts to implement waterbags as described at http://www.waterbag.com./ These modern flexible polymers have strong UV resistance and salt water tolerance and are likely to be suitable for profitable applications at sea, although the water transport method promoted by Terry Spragg has not yet found any backing. My aim in raising use of plastics here as a geoengineering method is to describe simple application concepts with potential to help mitigate climate change where small prototyping can guide feasibility.

 

My suggestion here for the Arctic would only work in summer, with 24/7 operation during midnight sun.  Analysis would indicated to what extent it could be paid for by fish farm below - larger entering fish would be unable to escape and would feed on small fish attracted by algae. The whole system would float along the Gulf Stream current to a processing ship in the Barents Sea, steered by combination of small accompanying vessel and wave system.    With rich deep cold water pumped by wave action across a reflective sheet just below the surface, the CO2 in the water would optimise algae growth rather than escaping to the atmosphere. The reflective sheet would send incoming solar radiation back to space while also promoting surface algae bloom, significantly cooling the surrounding current.  The sheet would be folded up and sunk during storm. Optimal sheet depth might be anywhere between ten centimetres and a few metres, but I would expect about one metre.

If the whole system pumped water out in a spiral around a sheet of diameter say 500 metres, it might be possible to collect the warm algated water at the outlet, and either use it for commodity production (food/fuel/fertilizer/fabric) or just sink it to the ocean floor below the halocline to quarantine the heat and carbon, although that would not pay.  The site http://www.divediscover.whoi.edu/arctic/circulation.html# provide a good summary on arctic circulation.

 

These sort of innovations are in my opinion best driven by a combination of profit and ecology, using market incentives to fix the climate.  I fear SRM proposals such as aerosol screening are likely to struggle due to costs and absence of a profitable product.

 

Robert Tulip

From: Gregory Benford <xben...@gmail.com>
To: gh...@sbcglobal.net
Cc: rtuli...@yahoo.com.au; "geoengi...@googlegroups.com" <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 19 June 2012 11:07 AM
Subject: Re: [geo] CDR: Arctic phytoplankton - Nature's little geoengineers?

I echo Greg Rau's comments. Good idea to do something, but plastic? Really?

I looked at this in 2005 and wrote a piece on aerosol screening the Arctic ("Saving the Arctic," attached in its pop version). I encouraged Ken Caldiera & others to do a simulation. It seems to work pretty well.

The cost is ~$200 to $300 million/year, deployed by existing (though modified) KC-10 refueling craft, which are about to be replaced by a fancier upgrade and thus will be even cheaper to buy.

Aerosols have none of the side effects Greg mentions, though they may have others. We could do this NOW--my main point then.

Alas, we suffer in the hands of a largely incompetent government which could protect its simple national interests (& those of the Inuit etc) by acting. But the executive (which could do this by direct order, since it's already a national defense issue) is distracted. Though the president's science advisor is John Holdren, whom I worked with as a postdoc at Livermore, little gets done on such issues.

But the environment doesn't care about politics. Never has.

Gregory Benford

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 8:48 PM, RAU greg <gh...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Thanks, Robert.  Interesting indeed, including the 85 comments at the end of the article. As for saving the Arctic, if we float stuff out there, won't that block the light for the algae? If we wave-pump water up from the depths, won't that also bring up more CO2?  What happens to the pumps in the winter - ice, no waves? We hire the locals to haul them in? And who pays? Anyway, funding aside, I would suggest running this by a few oceanographers before launching. 

As for why we don't have any effective policies that would support saving the Arctic or the planet, I can highly recommend a book I just finished; Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway.  Really impressive how a well funded, tiny minority can neutralize scientific evidence, and paralyze policy and action on a whole range of issues. The term "intellectual terrorism" comes to mind, but I digress. 

Keep us posted on your progress,

Greg 

From: Robert Tulip <rtuli...@yahoo.com.au>
To: "geoengi...@googlegroups.com" <geoengi...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Mon, June 18, 2012 6:10:43 PM
Subject: Re: [geo] CDR: Arctic phytoplankton - Nature's little geoengineers?

The Economist Magazine has a special report this week on the warming of the Arctic Ocean.

The report is available at http://www.economist.com/node/21556798 and is highly informative.

 Originally Posted by The Economist

"A heat map of the world, colour-coded for temperature change, shows the Arctic in sizzling maroon. Since 1951 it has warmed roughly twice as much as the global average. In that period the temperature in Greenland has gone up by 1.5°C, compared with around 0.7°C globally. This disparity is expected to continue. A 2°C increase in global temperatures—which appears inevitable as greenhouse-gas emissions soar—would mean Arctic warming of 3-6°C.

Almost all Arctic glaciers have receded. The area of Arctic land covered by snow in early summer has shrunk by almost a fifth since 1966. But it is the Arctic Ocean that is most changed. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s the minimum extent of polar pack ice fell by around 8% per decade. Then, in 2007, the sea ice crashed, melting to a summer minimum of 4.3m sq km (1.7m square miles), close to half the average for the 1960s and 24% below the previous minimum, set in 2005. This left the north-west passage, a sea lane through Canada’s 36,000-island Arctic Archipelago, ice-free for the first time in memory.

Scientists, scrambling to explain this, found that in 2007 every natural variation, including warm weather, clear skies and warm currents, had lined up to reinforce the seasonal melt. But last year there was no such remarkable coincidence: it was as normal as the Arctic gets these days. And the sea ice still shrank to almost the same extent.

There is no serious doubt about the basic cause of the warming. It is, in the Arctic as everywhere, the result of an increase in heat-trapping atmospheric gases, mainly carbon dioxide released when fossil fuels are burned. Because the atmosphere is shedding less solar heat, it is warming—a physical effect predicted back in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist. But why is the Arctic warming faster than other places?" more

 

This excellent report prompted me to formulate the following idea.

Geoengineering the climate can focus on cooling the Arctic Ocean in order to slow the ice melt and increase albedo, reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space. One potentially commercial method to achieve this goal is to float large sheets of reflective plastic just below the ocean surface, released from Norway into the Gulf Stream. The design would aim to optimise algae and fish growth, using wave energy to raise deep nutrient-rich water to the surface in 'Lovelock Tubes', and spreading this rich water across the surface sheet to mimic the upwelling of currents that are the source of the richest fisheries. This method would cool the surrounding water, reducing the heat input that is melting the sea ice. The systems would attract and feed fish with naturally produced algae, serving as efficient fish farms. They would float along the Gulf Stream as shown at Arctic Currents into the Barents Sea, where produced fish could be harvested. Small initial prototypes would identify design issues for potential scale up. The primary natural geoengineering impact would be entirely ecologically beneficial, cooling the Arctic Ocean to delay the risk of catastrophic warming.   

 

Robert Tulip

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