Stephen Leahy - Earth's rocks can absorb a shocking amount of carbon: here’s how

The depths of the planet offer a rock-hard potential solution to climate change.

Stephen Leahy believes a significant amount of carbon can be removed from the atmosphere. He's quite excited about its potential but doesn't mention how much it might cost. 

These new discoveries about the ability of the Earth to absorb carbon “give me tremendous optimism,” Hazen says.

Watching rock grow

One of these sequestration methods involves a large slab of rock pushed up from Earth's upper mantle long ago in what’s now the country of Oman. Known as the Samail Ophiolite, weathering and microbial life inside the rock take carbon dioxide out of the air and turns it into carbonate minerals.

The process is so effective that “you can actually watch carbon dioxide being sucked out of the atmosphere and being deposited as rocks before your very eyes,” says Hazan.

Experiments pumping carbon-rich fluids into the ophiolite rock formation show that carbonate minerals form very rapidly. That could potentially remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, though it would be a huge project and very different for Oman, which is dependent on its oil revenues, he says.

Stephen Leahy - Earth's rocks can absorb a shocking amount of carbon: here’s how