Design for a Machine, French, eighteenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1962.
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Miscellany
According to the iron hypothesis, sprinkling iron into low-chlorophyll regions of the ocean would create large algal blooms. Oceanographer John Martin argued that large-scale iron enrichment could grow enough algae in the oceans to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and reverse the greenhouse effect. “Give me half a tanker of iron,” he famously said in 1988, “and I will give you an ice age.”
I have always found it in mine own experience an easier matter to devise many and profitable inventions than to dispose of one of them to the good of the author himself.
—Hugh Plat, 1595
