Kelemen’s plan involves accelerating the natural reactions by drilling several kilometers down, to where the rocks are hotter, and pumping in seawater saturated with CO 2 drawn from the air. And Oman, with about 15,000 cubic kilometers of the rock, has plenty of capacity. “If you that by a factor of a million”-something Kelemen thinks is doable with a bit of engineering-“then you end up with a billion tons of CO 2 per cubic kilometer of rock per year,” he says. That’s roughly one gram of the greenhouse gas per cubic meter of stone. Kelemen and his colleagues estimate that Oman’s exposed mantle rocks are absorbing and petrifying up to 100,000 metric tons of CO 2 every year. When I tapped it with a pebble, it emitted a glassy clang. Kelemen pointed to one a centimeter across composed of magnesium carbonate. The rock was crisscrossed with these creamy-white veins. The water and gases react with the rock, forming solid veins of new minerals that dig, like tree roots, ever deeper into the stone. When rain percolates through cracks in the rock, it brings dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide from the air. Kelemen motioned to the wall of rock behind us, made of brownish, weathered mantle rock called peridotite. Leathery dollops of camel dung were strewn in the gravel at our feet.
#CO MOLAR MASS SKIN#
Now 65, Kelemen is a geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, with cropped gray hair and skin tanned by decades of working outside. A hundred meters away, under a canopy, was a makeshift outdoor laboratory with tables, chemicals and a specialized scanner for examining rock samples. He introduced this vision to me one afternoon in January 2018 as we sat in camp chairs in Wadi Lawayni in the tattered shade of a scraggly acacia tree. Peter Kelemen thinks this geologic oddity might help humans change the course of the climate emergency. The rock was shoved to the surface through an accident of plate tectonics around 80 million years ago, and now that it is exposed to the elements, it is undergoing a smoldering, flatulent geochemical decay. It may have formed dozens of kilometers below the surface, within the mantle-the middle layer of our planet, which humans have never directly seen-far deeper than any oil well or diamond mine. The rock is an anomaly of minerals that are chemically unstable on Earth’s surface. The valley, sparsely dotted with thorny shrubs, is ringed by worn pinnacles of faded brown stone that rise hundreds of meters into the air.
#CO MOLAR MASS FULL#
Groundwater in this region occasionally surfaces in small pools that have a bluish tint-saturated with alkaline salts and sometimes so full of hydrogen gas that the liquid fizzes like champagne when it’s raised out of a well. A visitor gets there by following a lonely dirt road that dwindles to tire tracks running through a gravelly wash. Wadi Lawayni is a remote desert valley in the interior Al-Hajar Mountains of Oman, east of Saudi Arabia.
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