• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.198-207
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• 2012

In this study, we investigated the effect of ocean fertilization by deep sea water, using an ecosystem model which contains not only phytoplankton but also zooplankton. The model is based on NEMURO which consists of eleven compartments - two species of phytoplankton, three species of zooplankton, $NO_3$, $NH_4$, $Si(OH)_4$, particulate organic nitrogen, dissolved organic nitrogen and particulate silicon. We introduced nitrogen cell quota in the both species of phytoplankton, and silicon cell quota in the large phytoplankton in addition to the eleven compartments of NEMURO. We made the experiment at Izu Oshima Island in order to investigate the effect of ocean fertilization. In this experiment, we could not find clear differences between the cases with and without deep sea water. We investigated the causes of the experiment results by the model simulations. One of the causes was high concentrations of nutrients in surface seawater used in the experiment. Another was that the increase of total concentration of inorganic nitrogen does not necessarily accelerate the photosynthetic rate because inorganic nitrogen uptake rate is related to the ratio of $NO_3$ to $NH_4$. Because the model can represent the results of the experiment, we investigated the effect of ocean fertilization by deep sea water using this model. We found that the effect of ocean fertilization hardly appeared when the interval of the addition of deep sea water was too short, or the amount of deep sea water was too much. It is supposed that if the addition of deep sea water is too frequent or too much, the dilution of plankton's concentrations will exceed the effect of promoting phytoplankton's photosynthesis.