Photo: phytoplankton
Iron-based fertilizer, engineered into nanoparticles, could effectively help store excess carbon dioxide in the ocean. Adding specific combinations of carefully engineered non-toxic metal-oxygen materials as fertilizers could encourage growth of phytoplankton (microscopic plants) to act as a carbon sink. As they die, they would sink deep into the ocean, taking large quantities of excess carbon with them. This proposed fertilization would simply speed up a natural process already safely sequestering carbon in a form that could remove it from the atmosphere for thousands of years.
www.pnnl.gov/news-media/fertilizing-ocean-store-carbon-dioxide