Is Storing Carbon Dioxide Under the Ocean a Viable Strategy for Combating Global Warming?
Probably you missed it, but last week there was a fascinating interview on the NPR program Talk of the Nation. The segment featured a scientist named David Goldberg, who answered questions about his research concerning the plausibility of storing massive amounts of carbon dioxide in basalt formations deep below the earth’s oceans.
In a paper that is available online and will be published in an upcoming issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Goldberg and his colleagues write about how a basalt formation off of the coast of Oregon and Washington could potentially store anywhere from 120-150 years of carbon produced by the United States in its cavities (assuming current U.S. emission rates do not increase).
While initially I was extremely skeptical of this idea (because I thought that it might cause all kinds of unintended ecological havoc), by the end of the interview, I was somewhat more optimistic.
