To: Hawkmoon who wrote (3733 ) 2/16/2014 10:45:38 PM From: Maurice Winn Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 4326 <The primary question I have is why those phytoplankton levels have decreased. I have gut hunch that possibly CO2 emissions by humanity has exceeded nature's ability to provide sufficient Iron and other trace nutrients so that phytoplankton can actually metabolize and sequester that excess CO2. > That seems unlikely. Things reproduce up to the limit of their available resources. So before people provided bonus CO2, the phytoplankton were already limited by something or many things at different times and places. Suppose they are limited by iron, adding extra CO2 doesn't make them more prolific. It seems more likely that extra CO2 was coincidental rather than causal. But maybe like adding CO2 to air makes plants need less water, so they can expand into desert, adding CO2 to oceans enables phytoplankton to better use the available iron so fish proliferated for decades, but then the iron ran out so the phytoplankton fizzled out too. That seems unlikely. But whatever the causes, iron deficiency has been shown to be a major issue. Perhaps iron varies naturally, being boosted with volcanic eruptions, or periodic meteorite showers, and dwindling as the supplies are used up. Here is iron sand in New Zealand: <The Taharoa ironsand mining project was commissioned in 1972 and has been a success story for the local community and New Zealand Steel Mining . (www.nzsteel.co.nz) Taharoa, an isolated and exposed location on the North Island’s west coast, has the largest deposits of ironsand (titanomagnetite) in New Zealand. There was an estimated 300 million tons of concentrate available when the mining project commenced. Titanomagnetite sand comes from volcanic deposits which have been eroded by coastal action and dispersed along the coast by littoral currents. Taharoa has both wind and waterborne deposits in dunes reaching up to 90 metres (m) in height. The ironsand is mined by a floating cutter suction dredge. The material is then concentrated through cyclonic and magnetic separators, and stored in stockpile heaps. The area has no natural harbour and is subject to storms and waves of up to 11m high. As such, the ironsand concentrate is pumped as a slurry out to a bulk cargo ship tethered to a single point mooring buoy 3 kilometres (km) from the shore. In terms of value, the titanomagnetite concentrate is a low grade iron ore with 57 per cent iron by weight and 7.6 per cent titanium dioxide. However, the ironsand is exported to places such as Australia, China and Japan. > The way the iron got into the sand was by being buried as radiolarian and other marine deposits on the ocean floor, trundled along on the oceanic crust to the subduction zone off NZ's coast, carried way down into the magma zone where various parts of the sediment are carried up, powering volcanic activity including shooting iron, among everything else, such as sulphur oxides, CO2 from hydrocarbon combustion and H20 into the sky. The iron blows around the world as ash and falls into the ocean where the food chain can eat it. Some iron gets deposited without eruption, along with basalt and other magma deposits, then eroded to form iron oxide sand. Maybe volcanic and meteorite iron deliveries are in a quiet spell for a few decades. Here's a Google response [not checked for accuracy] <However, I can still find a lot of different estimates for how much stuff hits Earth each year, partly because different studies look at different size ranges, and all the procedures have errors. Estimates for the mass of material that falls on Earth each year range from 37,000-78,000 tons. Most of this mass would come from dust-sized particles. > Maybe some decades it's more like 100,000 tons per year and others maybe only 20,000 tons per year. That's a big difference in iron deliveries. Deliveries by ship could easily supply that much per year. They could be loaded with iron sulphate ballast for return trips which could be sprayed out the funnel en route back to Volcanic activity varies wildly too. When Taupo, Krakatoa or Tambora go up, they are biggies and put a lot of iron into the air. Mqurice