Billionaire's Salmon Experiment

Will O'Brien shares a story about a Canadian billionaire's controversial ocean experiment.

"There's this Canadian billionaire called Ross who had this quote a few years ago. He said 'Give me a tanker of iron filings and I will give you an ice age.' What he meant was you could actually alter the weather of the earth by dunking iron into the ocean.

Basically, many parts of the ocean are low in iron. If you add iron to these parts, you stimulate algae growing at the surface. Algae then draws down carbon, fish eat it, the fish die and fall to the bottom of the sea, and the carbon goes from the air into the bottom of the ocean. This is generally good because we have too much carbon in the atmosphere and we want more fish, but you need to balance it carefully.

This dude didn't do it carefully. He went off the coast of Vancouver, partnered with Native Americans, and did an experiment where he dumped a load of iron filings. He removed thousands of tons of carbon through his quantifications, and that year they had the biggest take of salmon ever off the coast.

But the authorities didn't like his experimentation. The Canadians got him - the CIA busted his home with a warrant and he got in a lot of trouble. People haven't really done it since then because he was kind of the first hobbyist to do something like this at scale."