this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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Also, there's a bunch of ways to make Algae blooms in the ocean. Apparently even just dumping a bunch of iron dust in the ocean would cause lots of algae blooms - but we don't do it.
Because it has a lot of side effects and the oceans are under a lot of stress because of climate change already. So for the moment we don't fuck with it.
So when we say Climate Change is an immediate and irreversible threat... There's another clause there that's something like: but not to us right now as a species, more to the biodiversity that would be put at risk if we tried producing more Algae? So we're not going to address the "immediate and irreversible threat" in that way (use of algae), because it might upset other things in the ocean.
Would those other things be stuff like... Er... Important stuff. I'm just not sure about this stuff because I don't know that much about Climate Change in relation to Algae and Oxygen production.... And what/when the threat would warrant it.
Algae itself needs a functioning ecosystem to survive, to much algea will cause it to kill itself due to overpopulation (e.g. using up resources and dead algea not being cleaned up) while in a small scale humans can care for the algea, taking the place of the ecosystem, for any large area this would be unfeasible and the ecosystem including the algea would collapse.
A benifit of biodiversity is greater resilance to change, by selecting for the growth of specific algea using iron you cause other algea/plant that rely on the prior ecosys to die out (including those reliant on other organisms which died). this group of less diverse algea will be more susceptible to change, (diseases or environmental change) and as most of the algea in the world will be similar, most of the algea in the world could get wiped out in one go.
So the likely outcome would be an initial spike in carbon capture before the environment becomes unsuitable, collapses, and most of the algea dies.
So all im all at any meaningful scale in the sea this is and will always be, a terrible idea.
(A better idea would be lots of small manigable algea tanks which could realistically be maintained and won't affect the current diversity, diseases could also not spread between them. This would be expensive but could actually work as a long term solution)