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Deep in the jagged red mountains of Oman, geologists are drilling in search of the holy grail of reversing climate change: an efficient and cheap way to remove carbon dioxide from the air and oceans.
They are coring samples from one of the world's only exposed sections of the Earth's mantle to uncover how a spontaneous natural process millions of years ago transformed CO2 into limestone and marble.
[...] Around 13 tons of core samples from four different sites will be sent to the Chikyu, a state-of-the-art research vessel off the coast of Japan, where Keleman and other geologists will analyze them in round-the-clock shifts.
They hope to answer the question of how the rocks managed to capture so much CO2 over the course of 90 million years — and to see if there's a way to speed up the timetable.
Kelemen thinks a drilling operation could cycle carbon-rich water into the newly formed seabed on oceanic ridges far below the surface. Just like in Oman's mountains, the submerged rock would chemically absorb carbon from the water. The water could then be cycled back to the surface to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere, in a sort of conveyor belt.
The geologists are studying how well the rock core samples from Oman absorb CO2 in the hope they can build a means to sequester captured carbon in the Earth's mantle.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 15 2017, @01:08PM
Figure that tech got us into this, tech will get us out. I think it is desirable to change your life as you can to reduce polution because its obviously bad. But its hard to tell people to reduce their standard of living.
Reducing standard of living is obviously bad too because poor people are both high fertility (overpopulation being the primary driver of global warming after all) and care less about global warming (remember, they vote!).
Telling people to reduce their standard of living is easy these days. What remains hard is telling people that the religious fad of the day isn't the most important thing ever. It rarely sinks in [soylentnews.org].
Figure that tech got us into this, tech will get us out.
Beats massive human die-offs and resetting to a point where one is going to do it again.