Antarctic Krill - Future Visions and Ocean Engineering

Future Visions and Ocean Engineering

Despite the lack of knowledge available about the whole Antarctic ecosystem, large scale experiments involving krill are already being performed to increase carbon sequestration: in vast areas of the Southern Ocean there are plenty of nutrients, but still, the phytoplankton does not grow much. These areas are termed HNLC (high nutrient, low chlorophyll). The phenomenon is called the Antarctic Paradox, and occurs because iron is missing. Relatively small injections of iron from research vessels trigger very large blooms, covering many miles. The hope is that such large scale exercises will draw down carbon dioxide as compensation for the burning of fossil fuels.

Read more about this topic:  Antarctic Krill

Famous quotes containing the words future, visions, ocean and/or engineering:

    For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world.... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.”
    Primo Levi (1919–1987)

    Anyone with a real taste for solitude who indulges that taste encounters the dangers of any other drug-taker. The habit grows. You become an addict.... Absorbed in the visions of solitude, human beings are only interruptions. What voice can equal the voices of solitude? What sights equal the movement of a single day’s tide of light across the floor boards of one room? What drama be as continuously absorbing as the interior one?
    Jessamyn West (1902–1984)

    To the Ocean now I fly,
    And those happy climes that ly
    Where day never shuts his eye,
    Up in the broad fields of the sky:
    John Milton (1608–1674)

    Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in San Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.
    Merle Colby, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)