Extreme ironing

I used to teach a student who listed Extreme Ironing as one of his leisure pursuits. For the uninitiated, Extreme Ironing involves taking an ironing board and an iron to a remote or in some way difficult location, setting it up and then doing so ironing. If you don’t believe me, you can check this out for yourself with this BBC News report from 2002. Being a diver, his particular brand of the sport involved ironing underwater…

Recently, news of a different sort of marine ironing has come to the fore, namely the idea of adding iron (the chemical element) to ocean waters in order to promote growth of phytoplankton (microscopic plant life). Iron is a nutrient that is required for phytoplankton growth but it is lacking in many parts of the oceans. It is argued that the enhanced phytoplankton growth caused by the addition of iron leads to increased absorption of carbon dioxide from the ocean waters which then absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When the plankton subsequently die the solid parts sink to the seafloor taking the absorbed carbon with them and forming sediments in which the carbon remains locked for thousands of years. Thus the plankton bloom caused by the increased iron level serves to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and so reduces its impact there as a Greenhouse Gas and its contribution to global warming. That’s the theory anyway and there have a been a couple of small scale experiments to try to see this process in action and establish its potential for a means of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Not surprisingly, this is a controversial topic as it is not clear how efficiently it would work and what other impacts adding iron might have to marine ecosystems. Now there are plans for a new (larger) experiment on iron fertilisation in the Southern Ocean and there was a nice piece about this, and about measurements of the effects of naturally occuring iron fertilisation caused by volcanic islands, on the BBC Radio 4 programme “The Material World” last week.  Further details and more relevant web-links can also be found at this related BBC News report.