Word: waterous
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...only a matter of cutting greenhouse gases off at the source and to start considering how to clean up the mess that's already there. After all, when a busted pipe floods your home, you do more than just fix the leak and let evaporation take care of the water. You get out a bucket and start mopping...
...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 the atmosphere itself somehow, extracting CO2 the way a filter cleans the air in a home? Macroengineering like this is a fun thing for scientists to dream about, but it usually does not go much further, the scale and risks...
...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...
...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 a giant carbon dioxide collector...
...calculations, his plan would require 100 seawater-electrolysis plants, each as large as the largest sewage-treatment plant on Earth, built on shorelines around the world. They would draw out 180 billion metric tons of seawater each year, split the salt, keep the acid and pour back the water. And even that would remove just 10% of the more than 30 billion metric tons of CO2 we put into the air annually...