This episode dives into a radical proposal: using a buried nuclear explosion on the seafloor to break up basalt & speed up carbon removal via Enhanced Rock Weathering. The goal? Sequester 30 years of global CO2.
2/12
This episode unpacks a preprint by Hosea Olayiwola Patrick drawing lessons from COVID-19 for solar geoengineering.
📰 Here's your round-up of top #CarbonDioxideRemoval News / Developments from this week (09 June - 15 June 2025):
🔗:
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@InSoilClimate secured its largest funding to date through a €100 million agreement with Key Carbon, accelerating regenerative agriculture and carbon credit generation across Europe.
Canada Nickel partnered with NetCarb to scale mineral carbon sequestration at Crawford. NetCarb's tech could boost CO₂ uptake 10‑fold to 10–15 Mt/year, vs 1.5 Mt via Canada Nickel's proprietary IPT Carbonation.
🚨A new study [preprint] shows that injecting sulfur at 50km could make #SolarGeoengineering much safer.
It cools the planet more effectively, speeds ozone recovery & avoids stratospheric disruptions. This could be done using a fleet of clean, reusable H2 rockets.
DETAILS🧵1/10
2/ SAI involves spraying SO₂ into stratosphere, where it forms aerosols that reflect sunlight—cooling Earth. It mimics volcanic eruptions like Mt. Pinatubo (1991), which temporarily cooled the planet.
But current “SAI models” inject SO2 at a rate of 10 Tg/yr at ~25km altitude.
3/ But Injecting at 25 km creates problems
Aerosols accumulate in the tropical lower stratosphere, causing up to 6°C warming in that layer.
This disturbs jet streams, increases stratospheric water vapor, and delays the ozone layer’s recovery—by 25–55 years in Antarctica.
🚨A new study has revealed for the first time that ancient carbon, stored in landscapes for thousands of years or more, can find its way back to the atmosphere as CO₂ is released from the surfaces of rivers at a rate of 1.2 billion tonnes per year.
Details🧵1/8
2/ To understand the true source of river CO₂, researchers compiled a global dataset of 1,195 radiocarbon measurements of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), CO₂ & CH₄ from rivers & streams.
This let them determine whether the emitted carbon was modern—or much older.
3/ Using radiocarbon signatures (¹⁴C), they found that 59% of river CO₂ emissions come from "old" C—millennia-old soil carbon & even petrogenic carbon (rock-derived, >55,000 years old)
Only ~41% came from recent biological sources like plants & microbes (decadal carbon).