This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In July 2012, a renegade American businessman, Russ George, took a ship off the coast of British Columbia and dumped 100 tons of iron sulfate dust into the Pacific Ocean. He had unilaterally, and some suggest illegally, decided to trigger an algae bloom to absorb some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—an attempt at geoengineering, a tech-based approach to combating climate change. It was a one-off, the largest known geoengineering experiment at the time, and a harbinger for more to come.
Now a startup called Stardust