Word: carbonization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...earth will little note nor long remember what we do to it--at least over the course of its own grand time scale rather than our brief, urgent one. Once we stop burning fossil fuels, it could take as long as 100,000 years for the carbon dioxide we've been pouring into the atmosphere to be gone. Most of it will have settled into the ocean, on its way to becoming new limestone beds on the seafloor; the rest will have been absorbed by the land, some of it eventually forming new deposits of coal. Even now, the water...
...small ways, we've been trying to mop up our CO2 deluge for a while. It's true enough that if you plant a tree, you clean the air, because trees do take carbon out of the sky--but only a little and not for long. The moment a tree dies, it usually begins to release the carbon it absorbed, and logging and burning only accelerate that process. So scientists are thinking bigger thoughts: Is it possible to increase the oceans' capacity to absorb carbon--without making the water so acidic it dissolves corals? Is it possible to scrub...
...reasons the oceans soak up so much carbon is that phytoplankton--microscopic floating plants--love it, feasting on it and taking it out of circulation. The problem is, there are vast regions where the water is iron poor and plankton languish. The amount of iron the plants need and aren't getting is tiny--less than 20 lb. per sq. mi. (3 kg per sq km) by some estimates. If this were pumped as a diluted slurry into the wake of a ship steaming back and forth like a tractor seeding a field, the plankton would bloom and global...
Sometime next year, a California start-up called Climos plans to experiment with the technique, fertilizing about 4,000 sq. mi. (about 10,000 sq km) of ocean. The goal is not to prove that the iron makes the plankton grow but to determine how much carbon this takes out of the atmosphere and for how long. "When we add iron, we create plankton blooms," says oceanographer Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who led an earlier, smaller iron-seeding test, "but a lot of that just dies and decomposes" at the surface. Only when organic matter snows...
...matter is murky. In May, the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity called for a moratorium on everything but "small" experiments "in coastal waters." Climos chief science officer Margaret Leinen concedes that even if the idea works, it won't remotely deal with all the planet's excess carbon. But she says it doesn't have to. "We're not thinking of this as solving the problem," she says. "We're looking at this as one of a whole portfolio of techniques...