Science
Technology or natural solutions: what’s our best bet for fighting climate change?
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Humanity is currently facing some of its greatest challenges to date. We are witnessing debilitating droughts and ravaging wildfires, destructive floods and the loss of biodiversity — all things scientists have said for decades would happen due to our greenhouse gas emissions.
Apocalypse Plan B, a documentary from The Nature of Things, investigates some of the methods scientists are considering to slow down climate change, limit the damage that’s already done and cool the planet.
Dimming the sun by adding more gas to the atmosphere
David Keith is a Canadian professor of applied physics at Harvard University. He’s developed a strategy that could decrease the sun’s impact on Earth in an effort to keep us cool.
It’s based on the “volcano effect,” which happens when large volcanic eruptions spew tonnes of polluting gases like sulphur into the atmosphere. Gas particles that make it high into the atmosphere actually block some of the sun’s rays from reaching Earth’s surface, creating a surprising cooling effect.
Keith’s idea: intentionally release tonnes of sulphur gas into the stratosphere using aircraft. “It turns from a gas into little tiny particles, and those particles reflect away sunlight and can cool the planet a little bit,” he says in the documentary.
This isn’t a one-time fix. “We would have to start by putting 20,000 tonnes of sulphur in the stratosphere the first year,” Keith says in a talk featured in the film. “After 50 years, we’d be putting a million tonnes a year of sulphur in the stratosphere.”
Keith is quick to point out that this proposal only helps to cool the planet slightly while we still tackle the underlying problem of our emissions. “If anybody thinks this is a way to solve the problem of putting out CO2, they’re insane,” he says in the film.
This scientist has a proposal to fight climate change: intentionally release tonnes of sulphur gas into the stratosphere using aircraft, to dim the sun’s rays.
Some scientists are worried by the idea. “We can see that [dimming the sun] actually disrupts plant productivity because you change the distribution of sunlight,” says climate scientist Michael Mann. “That can end up shifting ocean currents and atmospheric wind patterns.”
Brightening clouds using fleets of autonomous ships
Sarah Doherty, a senior research scientist with the University of Washington’s department of atmospheric sciences, has her head in the clouds.
“Clouds are a really critical part of the climate system,” she explains in the documentary. “One of the factors that controls the temperature of the planet is how much cloud cover we have.”
Clouds work to reflect sunlight back out into space, and the whiter and brighter the clouds, the more sunlight is reflected. Doherty’s found that the more cloud cover we have, particularly low cloud cover, the cooler our planet. She’s been researching how we might brighten clouds over the oceans by using sea salt to enrich marine clouds.
In Australia, one team has put Doherty’s theory to the test. “We showed that it’s technically feasible to pump sea water and atomize it into trillions per second of tiny little sea water droplets,” says Daniel Harrison, an oceanographer and engineer at Southern Cross University. They are interested to see how the technology could help the Great Barrier Reef, which has experienced numerous mass bleaching events in recent years due to warming oceans. “In theory, [those droplets] can go on to help brighten clouds and cool the reef.”
But to brighten clouds on a large scale would take ships — a lot of ships — to make an impact. “You would need thousands,” says Doherty. She envisions an autonomous fleet that would run on renewable energy, patrol specific ocean regions and respond to weather conditions.
Capturing carbon and storing it underground
Carbon capture is an attractive technology for the oil, gas, cement and steel industries, which are among the biggest emitters. It allows them to sequester much of the CO2 that’s produced by their operations, compress and liquify it, and pump it underground instead of releasing it to the air.
“Carbon capture and sequestration is very seductive,” says Mann. “[It] sounds like we can continue to burn fossil fuels and not worsen the climate crisis.”
But he’s quick to point out that there are still carbon emissions being released into the atmosphere. “In the very best cases, these plants capture maybe 70, maybe 80 per cent of the carbon pollution they generate.”
So what can be done about the carbon that’s accumulating in the atmosphere over time?
Direct air capture may offer a solution. This technology uses giant fans like a big vacuum, sucking up air and filtering out the CO2.
“We extract CO2 from the air and permanently remove it by storing it underground in rock formations,” says Jan Wurzbacher of Climeworks, an Iceland-based carbon capture company that isn’t associated with the fossil fuel industry.
Currently, their plant uses only green energy to remove an amount of carbon equivalent to what’s emitted by 870 cars every year. But the company has ambitious plans to remove one gigatonne every year — just over the amount that humans emit every month — by 2050.
“It’s not as invasive and dangerous as some of the other technologies that are being talked about,” says Mann. “[But] you’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle, and that’s difficult to do.”
Harnessing Earth’s very own carbon capture technology: forests
The Earth has seen huge climate fluctuations over its 4.5 billion-year history. Over time, the climate stabilized, and the planet’s animal and plant life began to recycle carbon in a balanced way.
One of the best examples of this all-natural carbon capture technology? Trees.
“I’d estimate that this tree stores about 5,000 kilograms of carbon,” says Lola Fatoyinbo in the film as she examines just one tree in a forest. “That’s five tonnes of carbon.”
Fatoyinbo is a research scientist with NASA’s biospheric sciences lab, and she studies forest ecosystems from space. In Fatoyinbo’s research, she uses data gathered from instruments on the International Space Station to map the density of the world’s forests, understanding their role in fighting climate change and how much CO2 they can remove from the atmosphere each year.
Lola Fatoyinbo is a NASA research scientist who studies forest ecosystems from space. Using data gathered from instruments on the space station, she’s able to map the world’s forests, and the effect they have on our planet.
“Restoration of mangroves, forests and wetlands — these are really important mechanisms that are part of our fight,” says Fatoyinbo.
Rethinking farming
Gabrielle Bastien holds up a single clump of soil. “[This clump] contains more microorganisms than there are humans on this Earth.” Bastien is the founder of Regeneration Canada, part of a global movement among farmers to change how we grow our food.
“It’s a whole ecosystem in there,” she says in the documentary. Today’s common farming practices, however, lead to soil degradation — one of the biggest contributors to climate change.
“Soils are actually the largest terrestrial carbon sink,” says Bastien. “Aside from oceans, they contain the largest reserve of carbon on Earth.” When that rich, biodiverse soil ecosystem is disrupted by plowing and tilling, its carbon content is largely emitted to the atmosphere.
In Apocalypse Plan B, Bastien visits Sebastien Angers, a farmer who is doing things a little differently. He’s adopted regenerative farming practices that mimic nature, such as using a no-till drill to plant seeds and seeding a variety of crops in the same field so they can nourish each other. “If you think of a natural ecosystem, it’s a very biodiverse system,” he says.
Angers also uses cover crops to shade the soil. This helps keep the earth moist and cool, increases the diversity in his fields and reduces the need for pesticides.
“We need this richness,” says Angers. “If you plow, you lose that. This field [took] 15 years to get this earthworm, fungi richness. It’s really long to build, really easy to destroy.”
But is it too late to affect change?
When it comes to fighting climate change, there appear to be many potential technological and natural tools in our arsenal, but how much time do we really have to use them?
“Because we’ve left it so late, we need to draw down as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as we can and turn it into solid carbon,” says environmental writer and activist George Monbiot in the documentary. “The best, quickest and cheapest way of doing that is to turn it into trees, to turn it into wetlands, to turn it into other ecosystems.”
“It really is not too late because social change can happen at great speed,” he says. “We can change to being an ecological civilization, and we can change very rapidly indeed.”
Science
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An Indigenous scientist explores the medicine the Earth needs
Quirks and Quarks19:12An Indigenous ecologist on why we need to stop and listen to save the planet
Earth day is April 22. And Earth is not in great shape to celebrate the day. Overheated, overpopulated, overexploited – we’re not being particularly careful with our planet. We talk to Indigenous ecologist Jennifer Grenz of the University of British Columbia about her new book, which is part memoir, part prescription for the medicine our planet needs – a compound of science and traditional wisdom. Her book is Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A journey toward personal and ecological healing.
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In a remarkable development, NASA has given the green light to the Dragonfly mission, a revolutionary rotorcraft designed to investigate the complex chemistry of Saturn‘s moon Titan.
This confirmation allows the mission to proceed with the final design, construction, and testing of the spacecraft and its scientific instruments.
Deciphering the prebiotic chemistry on Titan
The Dragonfly mission, led by Dr. Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will carry a cutting-edge instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS).
This powerful tool will help scientists delve into the intricate chemistry at work on Titan, potentially shedding light on the chemical processes that led to the emergence of life on Earth, known as prebiotic chemistry.
“We want to know if the type of chemistry that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth is taking place on Titan,” explains Dr. Trainer, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist specializing in Titan.
Titan: Dragonfly’s target
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is shrouded in a dense nitrogen-rich atmosphere, bears a striking resemblance to Earth in many ways. With a diameter of 5,150 kilometers, Titan is the second-largest moon in our solar system, surpassed only by Jupiter’s Ganymede.
Dense atmosphere and unique climate
One of Titan’s most distinctive features is its thick atmosphere, which is composed primarily of nitrogen and methane. This dense atmosphere creates a surface pressure 1.5 times higher than Earth’s, making it the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere.
The presence of methane in Titan’s atmosphere leads to a fascinating hydrological cycle, similar to Earth’s water cycle, but with methane as the primary liquid.
Titan’s surface is dotted with numerous lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons, predominantly methane and ethane. These liquid bodies, some of which are larger than the Great Lakes on Earth, are the result of Titan’s unique climate and atmospheric conditions.
The Cassini mission, which explored the Saturn system from 2004 to 2017, provided stunning images and data of these extraterrestrial lakes and seas.
Dragonfly mission to search Titan for prebiotic chemistry and life
The complex chemistry occurring on Titan’s surface and in its atmosphere has drawn significant attention from astrobiologists.
With its abundant organic compounds and the presence of liquid methane, Titan is considered a prime candidate for studying prebiotic chemistry and the potential for life to emerge in environments different from Earth.
Beneath Titan’s icy crust lies another intriguing feature: a global subsurface ocean of liquid water and ammonia. This ocean, which is believed to be salty and have a high pH, may potentially host microbial life.
The presence of this subsurface ocean, along with the unique chemistry on Titan’s surface, makes this moon a fascinating target for future exploration and scientific research.
Pushing the boundaries of rotorcraft exploration
Nicky Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, emphasized the significance of the Dragonfly mission, stating, “Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth.”
Titan’s unique characteristics, including its abundant complex carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean, and past presence of liquid water on the surface, make it an ideal destination for studying prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment.
Innovative design and cutting-edge technology
The Dragonfly robotic rotorcraft will leverage Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere to fly between different points of interest on the moon’s surface, spanning several miles apart.
This innovative approach allows the entire suite of instruments to be relocated to new sites once the previous one has been thoroughly explored, providing access to samples from diverse geological environments.
DraMS, developed by the same team responsible for the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard the Curiosity rover, will analyze surface samples using techniques tested on Mars.
Dr. Trainer emphasized the benefits of this heritage, stating, “This design has given us an instrument that’s very flexible, that can adapt to the different types of surface samples.”
Dragonfly mission challenges and funding
The Dragonfly mission successfully passed its Preliminary Design Review in early 2023. However, due to funding constraints, the mission was asked to develop an updated budget and schedule.
The revised plan, presented and conditionally approved in November 2023, hinged on the outcome of the fiscal year 2025 budget process.
With the release of the president’s fiscal year 2025 budget request, Dragonfly is now confirmed with a total lifecycle cost of $3.35 billion and a launch date set for July 2028.
This reflects a cost increase of approximately two times the initially proposed cost and a delay of more than two years from the original selection in 2019.
Despite the challenges posed by funding constraints, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, and an in-depth design iteration, NASA remains committed to the Dragonfly mission.
Additional funding has been provided for a heavy-lift launch vehicle to shorten the mission’s cruise phase and compensate for the delayed arrival at Titan.
Rigorous testing and validation
To ensure the success of the Dragonfly mission, researchers on Earth have conducted extensive testing and validation of the designs and models for the nuclear-powered, car-sized drone.
The mission team has carried out test campaigns at NASA’s Langley Research Center, utilizing the Subsonic Tunnel and the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel (TDT) to validate computational fluid dynamics models and gather data under simulated Titan atmospheric conditions.
Ken Hibbard, Dragonfly mission systems engineer at APL, emphasized the importance of these tests, stating, “All of these tests feed into our Dragonfly Titan simulations and performance predictions.”
As the Dragonfly mission progresses, it marks a new era of exploration and scientific discovery. Dr. Trainer expressed her excitement, saying, “Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission.”
Turning science fiction into fact with the Dragonfly mission
In summary, the Dragonfly mission embodies the essence of human curiosity and the relentless pursuit of knowledge. As NASA prepares to send this revolutionary rotorcraft to the alien world of Titan, we stand on the brink of a new era of exploration and discovery.
With its innovative design, cutting-edge technology, and the unwavering dedication of the mission team, Dragonfly will unlock the secrets of prebiotic chemistry and shed light on the potential for life beyond Earth.
As we eagerly await the launch of this titanic mission, we can only imagine the wonders that await us on Saturn’s enigmatic moon. The Dragonfly mission is a testament to the indomitable human spirit and our boundless capacity to push the frontiers of knowledge.
In the words of Ken Hibbard, “With Dragonfly, we’re turning science fiction into exploration fact,” and that fact will undoubtedly inspire generations to come.
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Science
Marine plankton could act as alert in mass extinction event: UVic researcher – Langley Advance Times
A University of Victoria micropaleontologist found that marine plankton may act as an early alert system before a mass extinction occurs.
With help from collaborators at the University of Bristol and Harvard, Andy Fraass’ newest paper in the Nature journal shows that after an analysis of fossil records showed that plankton community structures change before a mass extinction event.
“One of the major findings of the paper was how communities respond to climate events in the past depends on the previous climate,” Fraass said in a news release. “That means that we need to spend a lot more effort understanding recent communities, prior to industrialization. We need to work out what community structure looked like before human-caused climate change, and what has happened since, to do a better job at predicting what will happen in the future.”
According to the release, the fossil record is the most complete and extensive archive of biological changes available to science and by applying advanced computational analyses to the archive, researchers were able to detail the global community structure of the oceans dating back millions of years.
A key finding of the study was that during the “early eocene climatic optimum,” a geological era with sustained high global temperatures equivalent to today’s worst case global warming scenarios, marine plankton communities moved to higher latitudes and only the most specialized plankton remained near the equator, suggesting that the tropical temperatures prevented higher amounts of biodiversity.
“Considering that three billion people live in the tropics, the lack of biodiversity at higher temperatures is not great news,” paper co-leader Adam Woodhouse said in the release.
Next, the team plans to apply similar research methods to other marine plankton groups.
Read More: Global study, UVic researcher analyze how mammals responded during pandemic
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