Slowing climate change? Potential and risks of enhanced marine silica weathering as a negative emission technology (NET)
Lecture by Lecture by Dr. Sandra Arndt, 2023 EAG Distinguished Lecturer
Recorded at Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Eotvos University Budapest, Hungary
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Global climate change is one of the biggest global challenges of the 21st century, and urgently requires ambitious, transformative, and collective action to limit global warming. This can be achieved by reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases emissions or by actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere (“negative emissions”). Achieving the Paris climate goal requires the development of Negative emission technologies (NET) that often build on accelerating natural negative carbon-cycle climate feedbacks.
Enhanced marine silicate weathering has been proposed as a promising NET. It has been suggested that the distribution of silicate minerals to coastal marine sediments would drive high weathering rates and thus enhance the uptake of atmospheric CO2 by increasing ocean alkalinity. However, the efficiency of marine ESW in stimulating oceanic CO2 uptake remains unquantified.
I illustrate how we used an integrated model-data approach to explore the efficiency and potential environmental risks of enhanced marine silicate weathering under a range of different environmental conditions.
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Sandra Arndt is based at the Geosciences, Environment and Society Department at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, where she is an Associate Professor in Geology.
Sandra’s research focuses on improving our understanding of carbon cycle-climate feedbacks and their role in determining the magnitude and pace of climate change. To address these research questions, she develops and applies numerical models that synthesize our current understanding of ocean carbon cycling across traditional disciplinary and ecosystem boundaries.
12 дек 2023
