It's just amazing that anyone wouldn't take notice to these facts:
To dispel misleading information now circulating about Planktos tropical Pacific pilot work west of the Galapagos Islands, we would like offer the following facts.
The location of our first pilot bloom is over 300 miles west of the Galapagos in the same general area the first two National Science Foundation funded ocean iron fertilization trials were conducted over a decade ago.
This site was carefully chosen by the legendary John Martin of Moss Landing Marine Lab and the international team of ocean scientists who carried out the actual research. The success of the first two IronEx I and IronExII blooms was a tribute to the genius of Martin's "iron hypothesis" which first deduced the key role of micronutrient iron in sustaining plankton health and ecosystem productivity.
Another ocean science prodigy NASA's Gene Feldman is credited for catalyzing Martin's historic insight when he handed him the first satellite photos of the remarkable Galapagos plume. The plume is a lush and nearly constant plankton bloom that arises down current from the islands in an otherwise unproductive ocean region. It was long known that the volcanic understructure of the Galapagos was remarkably rich in iron compounds, but now Martin held in his hand dramatic photographic evidence that this profuse iron source was producing one of the most spectacular and consistent plankton blooms on the planet.
This was what Martin and his colleagues had been searching for, an ideal location to test his theory that iron deficiency was the primary factor limiting ocean fertility. In one accessible region they had all the prerequisites for a perfect experiment: great stretches of nutrient-rich but iron-poor and relatively lifeless waters; a vast natural iron-fed bloom for comparison; and an opportunity to see if iron replenishment alone would trigger a similar bloom in neighboring waters. The IronEx I and IronExII experiments succeeded dramatically and sparked off eight more international efforts to explore the science and promise of this field.
Planktos will return to this region to extend the IronEx project series building on the earlier international research, science and environmental impact data. The Planktos project team will include scientists and engineers from many disciplines and institutions around the world to conduct the larger and longer studies called for by the ocean science community. The scale of the Planktos bloom will be approximately 10,000 square km, approximately 2-3% the size of normal wind-seeded blooms and less than 10% the size of the rich Galapagos "plume".
From NASA's "Ocean Color Data and Resources" site
Here, iron is supplied by dust blown off the Galapagos Islands, but primarily from the underwater volcanic rocks and black smokers that add colloidal iron to the nearby waters. The Planktos bloom will be seeded hundreds of miles west of the Galapagos in waters equally nutrient rich but quite impoverished in terms of iron and ocean life.
This extensive natural "plume" near the Galapagos clearly shows that even supersaturated iron enrichment does not adversely affect ocean waters. Indeed, it is the ancient secret behind the lush plankton blooms that support the environmental wonders of the Galapagos ecosystem.
I just can't over what happened at Las Palmas and that the University turned their backs to the Weatherbird (and directly at Planktos Corp, imo.) foiling pretty much the entire operation. The delays they went through while at the Portuguese island of Madeira where the ship had been docked after being turned away at the Port of Las Palmas; awaiting the resources necessary to initiate and monitor its first research plankton blooms, ruined the Weatherbird's first mission, but imo, not the last!
