Word: co2
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That's why a paper that came out last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was so alarming. CO2, the scientists concluded, is piling up faster than ever in the air, not only because our emissions continue to rise but also because the ocean and land have quit sopping up as much as they used to. Apparently, they've had enough...
...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...
...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 CO2 levels--in theory--would fall...
...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 into the deep does CO2 get locked away. Climos is in the process of raising the $12 million or so it will need to run its experiment, which will use rain-gauge-like underwater traps and other techniques to capture and measure this precipitate...
...ocean far more plentiful than its plankton: its salt. Sea salt, like table salt, is made of sodium chloride. If you break that compound in two, you create an acid and a base. Remove some of the acid, and you change ocean chemistry in such a way that atmospheric CO2 dissolves into the water, where it is taken up in the shells of marine creatures, which fall to the seafloor and become limestone. Essentially, says Kurt House, a Harvard graduate student who came up with the idea when he was jogging by the Charles River, the ocean "could become...