What hope now for avoiding catastrophic climate change? As all of the data on emissions, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and global warming point emphatically in the wrong direction, returning president Donald Trump has given the call to “drill, baby, drill”—a pledge to fast-track new fossil fuel projects and ramp up production. One presumes it’s an order that the world’s oil and gas giants, already backsliding from their previous commitments to transition to green energy, will be only too happy to heed.
Against this backdrop, the dark premonitions that haunt the minds of those persuaded by the scientific consensus on climate change—and the myriad horrors of a burning world—only intensify. With every tried and tested climate fix looking like a busted flush, radical new ideas are being explored with increasing urgency.
One of these is geoengineering. The large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to mitigate the impact of man-made climate change is seen by some as a technical challenge that will draw out the very best of human ingenuity and ultimately save the world. Others see it as the latest example of our deluded faith in technology.
You may be aware by now of solar geoengineering, which in most cases means reflecting sunlight before it has the chance to reach and heat Earth’s surface. Some believe we could pump sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to form a protective fug of sunlight-reflecting sulphate aerosols. Other theories, such as Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW), involve carbon sequestration. Rock weathering is actually a totally natural process in which carbon dioxide is drawn out of the atmosphere when a chemical reaction occurs between rainwater and rocks. With ERW, you accelerate this through mechanical means, allowing you to sequester significantly more CO2.
“This explosion would be well over a thousand times larger than the 50 megaton ‘Tsar Bomba’ test, the current largest nuclear explosion in history, which itself was around 3,800 times the strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”
It’s this process that forms the basis for perhaps the most extreme geoengineering proposal to emerge yet. In January, a paper appeared on arXiv, a website of non-peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Written by Andy Haverly, a 25-year-old Microsoft software engineer from Washington State, its proposition was a modest one—that we should try firing the largest nuclear bomb in history into the Earth’s crust in order to sequester 30 years’ worth of CO2 emissions in underwater rock.
In Haverly’s mind, the 81 gigaton nuclear bomb would be buried somewhere between 3 and 5km beneath the seabed of the remote Kerguelen Plateau, where the surrounding waters of the Antarctic Ocean themselves have a depth of 6 to 8km. This explosion would be well over a thousand times larger than the 50 megaton ‘Tsar Bomba’ test, the current largest nuclear explosion in history, detonated in 1961 by the Soviet Union in the Arctic Circle. (For reference, that explosion was around 3,800 times the strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. Apparently recycling isn’t going to cut it any more.)
According to Haverly, who doesn’t have a background in climate science or nuclear engineering but is currently studying for a PhD in quantum computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, the bomb would pulverize a vast amount of basalt rock (3.86 trillion tons, to be precise) into tiny pieces. Theoretically, this would then react with CO2 in the ocean to form stable carbonate minerals that lock the carbon away permanently. The deep ocean waters would, he claims, safely contain the blast.
Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/nuclear-bomb-earths-crust-geoengineering/
