Glacier flour is on the mountain where ice has melted at the Ossoue glacier on the Vignemale peak in the French Pyrenees in September 2021. The Ossoue glacier is the highest and largest glacier in the French Pyrenees. Specialists project its disappearance near 2050 due to climate change. the fine mud flowing from Greenland’s glaciers. It wasn’t until much later, when his own daughter had grown up and was in her mid-20s, that he realized how special it is.
The loss of his daughter’s boot got Rosing thinking. Maybe those tiny grains of rock could be used to trap something much bigger: the carbon emissions that are altering the frozen landscape and way of life on the island.“Greenland has been seen as the example and the horror story of climate change, and never been portrayed as a part of the solution,” said Rosing, a geology professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who was born in Greenland.
with rocks to form carbon-containing compounds that lock the gas out of the atmosphere. That naturally occurring process, called “chemical weathering,” literally petrifies the air.The problem — at least for us humans — is that chemical weathering takes millennia to work its carbon-absorbing magic. Humanity doesn’t have that kind of time: The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changesociety needs to drastically reduce CO2 emissions by the end of the decade.
During a Zoom interview, Rosing poured a bit of cream-colored rock flour from Greenland onto his index finger and held it up to the camera. The researchers estimate that, given enough time, spreading rock flour on all agricultural land in Denmark would suck up a quantity of carbon approximately equal to the annual emissions of that country (or of“There’s a novelty to the idea in using pre-ground material,” said Bob Hilton, an Oxford geochemist not involved in the research. “There’s interest in the idea because glacier processes produce huge amounts of this material.
Even though no extra energy needs to go into crushing rock flour, it may come with other environmental costs, such as the greenhouse-gas pollution from shipping it across the ocean and impacts on local ecosystems. And even though Greenland’s frigid waters slow the weathering process, rock flour would have already reacted with some CO2.“Just because these areas look like sediment factories, if you like, doesn’t mean that the grains haven’t already reacted in some way,” Hilton said..