Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected

Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

wglb•about 5 hours ago

Paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525919123

dmix•about 3 hours ago

TIL about silicate weathering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_cyc...

silicate rocks basically traps co2 over millions of years and causes temperatures to fall

chris_va•about 2 hours ago

It's really the alkalinity (e.g. the Mg++ or Ca++), which silicate rocks often have (but technically not limited to silicates).

As an aside, we need to dissolve roughly one large mountain into the mix layer (top ~50m) of the ocean to have it fully take up atmospheric CO2. Without dissolving, the reaction is very slow (co2 in atmosphere => slightly lower pH rain => reaction with mostly passivated rock + erosion).

prawn•about 3 hours ago

There are various companies/projects set up around that idea:

https://www.lithoscarbon.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbfix

https://co2crc.com.au/

https://sgeas.unimelb.edu.au/research/carbon-trap-lab

fred_is_fred•32 minutes ago

The Lithos Carbon idea is interesting. The mine they show looks like they can just scrape it rather than needing to mine it with explosives. Unfortunately the site's blog has 1 post and it is 3.5 years old. Is it still a going concern?

Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected

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Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews