Humanity has a long track record of making big changes with little forethought.
Humanity has a long track record of making big changes with little forethought. From fossil fuels to AI, plastics to pesticides, we love innovating away our problems, only to find we’ve created different ones. So it can be refreshing to hear about cases where we’ve taken a step back to deliberate before committing to a drastic new idea, like carbon dioxide removal.
With carbon emissions continuing to climb, many scientists, environmentalists and policy-makers have advocated taking action to directly remove carbon from the atmosphere. They argue that these geoengineering approaches are necessary to avoid catastrophic changes to our land, air and sea.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara are evaluating the effects of one such proposal that involves increasing the ocean’s alkalinity to boost carbon sequestration. The aim is to speed up the geologic processes that remove carbon from the atmosphere, which are very powerful, but very slow. The team investigated how this would affect two of the ocean’s most numerous and important plankton groups at the bottom of the food chain. Their findings, published in Science Advances, suggest that the plankton would fare well under the treatment, a positive result that encourages more research into this promising proposal.
Read more at University of California - Santa Barbara
Photo Credit: PublicCo via Pixabay
