Links: Crust Evolution, CO2 Emissions, DNA Structure

I'm posting a reading list after a long interval. Hope you like this selection. 

1) Secular Evolution of Continents and Earth Systems. The earth's outer shell has evolved and changed in its chemical and mechanical properties over time. This long term evolution has had profound consequences for geological and biological processes. Peter A. Cawood and colleagues have written an informative article in Reviews in Geophysics on the geologic history of the continental crust and its value as an archive for earth processes. The paper is open access, and there is also a shorter Q &A with lead author Peter Cawood which I have linked to in the title. 

2) Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution. What is the best approach to limiting global warming? Do geoengineering methods which remove CO2 from the atmosphere offer a way out? David T. Ho, using a simple and effective explanation, refutes that notion and argues convincingly that drastic emission cuts is the only way to slow down temperature rise.  

3) Rosalind Franklin's contribution to the discovery of DNA's structure. 1953 was a standout  year in our understanding of life with the publication of papers proposing a structure for DNA. Rosalind Franklin's role in this story has been either sidelined or misunderstood until recently. The authors of the linked essay, Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, are writing biographies of Francis Crick and James Watson respectively. They recently went through Rosalind Franklin's notes and some other unpublished documents which helped them piece together a different account of the discovery of the structure of DNA and Rosalind Franklin's key insights. 

This essay goes beyond the popular eureka moment narrative which held sway over people's imagination for a long time. Instead, we find collaboration between the teams working on this problem and many twists and turns before Watson and Crick came up with the solution. The article also raises important issues of ethics and sexism in science. 

Lessons In Carbon Storage From Geological Analogues - Open Access Geology

Mike Bickle and Niko Kampman in an open access article in the April issue of Geology summarize the findings of two papers (1 , 2)  published in the same issue on naturally occurring CO2 accumulations in sedimentary reservoirs and inferences drawn on their long term fate.

One potential strategy to manage growing atmospheric CO2 is to inject and store it in deep sedimentary aquifers with a retention time of at least ten thousand years.

The article identifies the key questions:

(1) how quickly will the buoyant CO2 dissolve in formation brines (good), (2) how quickly will the CO2 brines react with silicate minerals and precipitate solid carbonate phases (good), (3) will CO2 or CO2-charged brines corrode cap-rocks and escape upward (bad), and (4) will CO2 penetrate up fault zones (bad)?

It is dense but rewarding reading for those into mineralogy, phase equilibria and fluid-rock interaction. 

This is something that should be of enormous interest to Indian sedimentary basin specialists and climate change mitigation planners. In a recent post I mentioned about India's plans to build 400 odd more coal power plants in the next few decades. Many will be located near sources of coal in the continental rift basins of eastern India. Is carbon dioxide sequestration in natural reservoirs economically viable? Do these basins have favorable conditions deep underground for long term storage of CO2? It is research well worth funding given that our dependance on coal will last several more decades.
 

Indian Public Pick Out Future Energy Winner

One hopes green energy will increasingly contribute to India's energy pie.. but there is no denying which energy source the Indian public and industry place their confidence in..

Coal India IPO oversubscribed 15 times

Carbon sequestration I realize is expensive and not demonstrated on a large scale but maybe we should be giving some space to this technology in our conversations about reducing our carbon footprint.

Wedging California Apart Along The San Andreas Fault

BLDGBLOG writes about research being done along the San Andreas Fault in the Carrizo plain, in an effort to understand historical seismicity along the fault. The paper has been published in the September issue of Geology. The story has been making news as results suggest that major earthquakes since the 1300's have been occurring at approximately century long intervals before the last big one in 1857....

I love BLDGBLOG's imaginative scenario of the consequences of geologists digging deep trenches to study earth movements:

Imagine a rogue, university-funded team of geologists researching ever-lower levels of the earth, forcing themselves downward with separating devices that pin open rocky wounds to split whole landmasses along unanticipated faultlines. Using these tools—terrain deformation grenades gone linear—they create islands in the earth's crust, like walled castles of geology, carving out new blocks in the landscape.

Maybe its time for a sequel to Alistair Maclean's Goodbye California.

Geoengineering: Mad Science...Last Resort....Doable..?

Technological hubris..playing God with climate..mad science... in between these extremes are a range of intermediate options and views on geoengineering.

On NPR's Fresh Air writer Jeff Goodell talks about his book How to Cool the Planet. It is an informative restrained talk, not quite endorsing geoengineering.. only suggesting that since there seems to be no signs of serious global efforts to reduce emissions in any significant way... it may be time to start thinking seriously about geoengineering.

That won't come without its own problems. There will be geopolitical issues to be dealt with along with ethical issues of who can and should act as the earth's thermostat.

Speaking of geopolitical issues and international co-operation on geoengineering..at Energy Outlook Geoffrey Styles is skeptical that international treaties will work:,

Imagine having tried to get the delegates at Copenhagen to agree to let someone put finely-divided salt particles into the atmosphere over, say, the Arctic, to make clouds more reflective. Might as well have tried to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time.

That's the core of the problem as I see it: If we do end up needing to deploy geoengineering, it's likely to be precisely because we were unable to get every country on earth--or even just the small subset of large emitters--on the same page with regard to climate change, let alone establish a universally-trusted body to oversee their mitigation efforts. If we yoke geoengineering to the same UNFCCC/IPCC process that brought us the Copenhagen Climate Conference and the Kyoto Protocol, then we might as well forget it and try to figure out where to invest in the likely new beachfront property of the 2050s.

He has some interesting thoughts too on the set up of small scale geoengineering experiments.

Can India Cut Emission Intensity Without Carbon Sequestration?

Yes, is the answer at least according to the Indian government.

A reader left a comment on my previous post on the distribution of potential basalt and ophiolite carbon reservoirs asking:

In your original post you suggested this was probably a non-starter for India, given our unwillingness to implement cuts in emissions. Do you think recent moves by China (and now more modest ones by India) to cut emission intensity will change the equation at all?

The original post was the one on Deccan Basalts as a potential reservoir for carbon sequestration projects.

I don't know about the Chinese plan but the 5 point plan put forward by Mr. Jairam Ramesh the Minister of Environment and Forest, India, to cut carbon emission intensity does not include carbon sequestration as a strategy.

Instead the government is aiming to reduce emission intensity by 20-%-25% by 2020 using:

1) Mandatory fuel efficiency standards for vehicles by December 2011
2) Mandatory green building code
3) Amendments to energy conservation Act
4) Progress report on forest cover
5) 50% of new capacities in power plants to be based on clean coal technologies

If you think these are big concessions by the Indian government you would be wrong. There is nothing really radically new about the way India plans to achieve its voluntary target of reducing emission intensity. That process was already underway much before Mr. Jairam Ramesh's announcement.

Emission Intensity is a measure of the energy efficiency of your economy - emissions per unit GDP - and between 1990 and 2005 India reduced its emission intensity i.e. improved its energy efficiency by about 17%.

Automobile makers have been steadily improving vehicle efficiency for years. Other industries too in an effort to be competitive have been streamlining their processes and improving efficiency. The Indian government years ago has set targets for expanded forest cover. Even India's notoriously  wasteful coal power plants have been improving their efficiency over the last few years and a large fraction - as high as 60% to 70% - of  new coal plants from both the public and private sector will be built using cleaner technology, the so called supercritical coal plants which use advanced coal combustion technology. This trend is being driven not by government fiat but by the rising price of coal due to increased demand and the need to import larger quantities of the fuel.

All this implies that this new target the government has announced won't require politically difficult decisions. Instead, the government is relying along with a few nudges and pushes on the naturally growing efficiency of industry to achieve a large fraction of the target of reducing emission intensity.

On the other hand geoengineering strategies like carbon sequestration which avoid emissions altogether face several hurdles. For at least the immediate target of reducing intensity by 2020 the science and technology may not be ready. Sequestration is also expensive. This means coal plants will have to bear much higher costs than they would voluntarily agree to. And that means government regulations and tough political decisions. And there are potential land acquisition issues that may come up if the sites chosen for sequestration projects underlie agricultural or forest land.

So emission intensity riding on the back of increasing efficiency of the Indian economy is likely going to be the government mantra for some time to come.

Unfortunately increased warming is a result of the total amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. And those despite a reduction in emission intensity will keep increasing, although at a slower rate.

Nice Map Of Basalt and Ophiolite Potential Carbon Reservoirs

Here is a great looking world map which shows the distribution of continental  basalts (a) and ophiolite complexes (b). Ophiolites are slices of the earth' s oceanic crust and upper mantle that have been exposed on land by tectonic forces. They are found along ancient and modern convergent plate settings i.e. regions where two plates are converging and colliding with each other.

Can these mafic igneous rocks act as reservoirs for storing carbon dioxide?

Source: Permanent storage of carbon dioxide in geological reservoirs by mineral carbonation

The article is open access. I posted about this article before but more from the perspective of the Deccan Basalts as a potential CO2 reservoir and how that might conflict with other more immediate uses of that rock body.

I thought I'd pass along the link to this map too.

Nature Geoscience Issue On Carbon Dioxide Sequestration

The December issue of Nature Geosciences has a series of articles on carbon sequestration. The editorial is behind a pay wall but the Correspondences and Commentaries are open access.

There is an interesting article on the geopolitics of geoengineering in which the author Philip Boyd raises the concern that the benefits and unintended detriments of geoengineering strategies would be spatially non-uniform and might lead to conflict between nations:

....A key concern is the scale on which geoengineering strategies, both for solar radiation management and carbon removal proposals, are used. Stratospheric sulphur injection and ocean fertilization would need to be adopted on a large scale and sustained over long periods of time if they are to have any globally significant effects. But it is the very scale and longevity of these schemes that makes regionally heterogeneous side effects more likely, and the potential for discord between nations more real. The unintended dispersal of geoengineering agents will only exacerbate the problem. For instance, ocean circulation will rapidly disperse modified surface and subsurface waters, which may be depleted in both nutrients and oxygen owing to fertilization-driven increases in productivity and carbon export. Such low-quality waters could infiltrate marine exclusive economic zones....

Getting global or regional political consensus on anything is damn difficult and geoengineering too will face that test. Overall the articles lean towards implementing some sort of geoengineering for controlling atmospheric CO2 levels and climate change.