Adding iron or other nutrients to surface waters in the open ocean is a process known as Ocean Fertilization.

UNESCO: MEDIA SERVICES

We're not going to front like we understand exactly how it works, but two IBM researchers in California have announced that they've gotten closer to controlling the orientation and magnetic spin of individual iron atoms on a copper surface, which would have huge implications for nanotech storage -- imagine the basic tech in your hard drive shrunk down the molecular level.

ENGADGET: IBM researchers get closer to nanotech hard drives

As the iron travels through the air, the surface melts in rivulets that either vaporize or fall away in minuscule fragments, leaving a surface textured with grooves called regmaglypts.

FORBES: Hot Rocks

Over millions of years this created an oxygen-rich atmosphere that rapidly removed electrons from minerals near the surface, creating rust out of iron and forming thousands of new minerals from other metals like nickel, copper and uranium.

ECONOMIST: Minerals

This is because the atmosphere does not have an iron grip on the carbon-dioxide level in surface waters.

ECONOMIST: Ocean acidification

Our tradition ranges from Hiram S. Maxim, inventor of the first fully automatic machine gun, who was born in 1840 in Sangerville, Maine, to the renowned Bath Iron Works, which produces the world's most advanced surface warships.

WSJ: Paul LePage: Beretta, Colt and Magpul��Come to Maine

Like other iron minerals, green rust readily absorbs dissolved elements onto its surface, but green rust is not only particularly efficient at this in many cases, it can also react with toxic dissolved trace metals to make them insoluble, and as a result, renders them in nontoxic forms.

MSN: What green rust did long ago to the big blue ocean

This will map for the first time iron, magnesium, aluminium and silicon over the moon's entire surface.

ECONOMIST: Astronomy