The Rock Dust Solution to Carbon Drawdown and Nutrient Density
Did you know we are supposed to be deep in an ice age right now? The way the Earth is oriented tells us that it should be frozen over but that’s not the case. Why are we not underneath glaciers if the Earth’s tilt says we should be? It’s because we are humans and we tend to alter the planet.
It all started 10,000 years ago when we learned how to grow plants for food. As the human population grew, we cut down and burned the forests, which were huge carbon sinks. The forests had stored excess carbon, keeping levels in the 200 ppm range. We effectively started climate change with the dawn of agriculture.
As we continued to clear forests for farmland, CO2 levels increased over time. With the industrial age, we sharply increased CO2 levels with the advent of fossil fuel burning. The industrial age wasn’t the beginning of anything. It was just an acceleration of what we already doing.
The CO2 levels have continued to rise and now we are almost at 500 ppm, which hasn’t been seen in millions of years. This is why we aren’t in an ice age. The ice age can’t happen because of the elevated CO2 levels in the atmosphere. That’s probably a good thing because most of us probably wouldn’t survive a glaciation period. However, the opposite is happening. We are creating dangerous conditions for a hotter planet.
It’s probably most wise to stop burning fossil fuels and switch to renewables as quickly as possible. This will stop the amount of CO2 we keep putting in the sky.
However, the CO2 that still remains is going to be there for thousands if not millions of years. We probably need to do something about that for future generations to avoid climate change. Many want to focus on expensive, unproven technologies but there are two strategies we can take right now across the world that will make a huge impact.
Strategy #1: Restore tropical and boreal forests. Tropical forests grow quickly and boreal forests store the most carbon. We need to find degraded lands in these biomes and do major restoration efforts in a rapid manner.
Strategy #2: Spread rock dusts literally everywhere. Rock dusts have been found to absorb carbon from CO2 when it rains via a chemical reaction. This is called enhanced weathering. If we employ rock dusts across agricultural lands, parks, households, public spaces, sports fields, community gardens, school gardens, and anywhere else that has access to soil, we can begin to draw carbon out of the atmosphere and into the ground as a stable form of carbon.