"This carbon, if you put a price tag on it, is possibly the most expensive carbon there is on the planet," says Andrew Smith from ANSTO's Centre for Accelerator Science.
Weight for weight, the atoms might be more expensive than diamond but their value to the world at large could be priceless. "Ten million dollars in the slot!" Smith shouts over the roar of vacuum pumps as he loads a sample carousel into the ion source of the 10 million-volt ANTARES tandem accelerator."It's critical that we get this right … otherwise we'll have nothing."
Deep inside the machine, each sample in turn is hammered by a caesium plasma, liberating carbon 14 atoms and shooting them towards the detector at 10 per cent of the speed of light. The ANSTO accelerator runs for 50 straight hours. The tests deliver a good set of data and it's now a matter of interpreting the results. Over the coming months scientists will analyse how well hydroxyl has kept mopping up the pollutants we have been throwing at it over the last 150 years. We'll be able to chart hydroxyl alongside carbon dioxide and methane through the industrial age.
Evidence of chemical OH, cleansing atmosphere, a safe assumption, identified. Well done. Any news on a multi-billion $ response, to SurfaceTensionChange, AFTER potentially irreversible SubstructuralInflationDecommissioning whips hard rock balloon, out from beneath our feet.