Lead researcher Professor Rob Raiswell, from Leeds University, said: “The Earth itself seems to want to save us”. He discovered a shocking truth: melting icebergs can trigger a reaction that naturally sinks the CO2 out of the atmosphere and create an equilibrium by feedback to the global warming and CO2 emissions.
The team led by prof. Raiswell will perform an experiment this month off the British island of South Georgia, 800 miles south east of the Falklands, to see if the lab conditions and the experiments are also true in real nature.
They discovered that the glaciers release a huge quantity of iron particles during their meltdown. Iron is known to stimulate the growth of algae, which could absorb the CO2 in their photosynthesis and then sink it to the bottom of the ocean, with no possibility of return for hundreds of years.
The scientific community wanted to do these types of experiments several years ago, but the UN forbid them to, for fear of not breaking the already fragile environmental equilibrium. Updated with the new evidence, the UN decided to give the scientists a chance and allowed the experiments to be done.
It covers 20million square miles, and scientists say that if this could all be treated with iron, the resulting algae would remove three-and-a-half gigatons of carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to one eighth of all emissions annually created by burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.
The researchers will use huge amounts of iron sulphate (tons) to create algae. The patch will be so huge that it will be visible from outer space, and it is said that it could offset the carbon emissions of every car or industry in India and Japan.
There is still to be seen if their CO2-sinking algae experiment would work. We’ll keep you updated. In the meanwhile, if you liked the subject, post a comment on this below!