Crush the right rock and spread it on farms to help soil and the climate
Enlarge / Instead of adding crushed limestone to soil, we could opt for basalt. (credit: Mark Robinson)
The best response to a leaking pipe is to stop the leak. But even if you haven't quite got the leak solved, a mop can keep the pool of water on your floor from spilling into the next room.
That's kind of the situation we're in with our emissions of greenhouse gases. The only real solution is to stop emitting them, but anything that removes existing CO2 from the atmosphere could help lower the peak warming we experience. Some techniques to do that sound like pipe dreams when you consider scaling them up, but others can plausibly make at least modest contributions.
A new paper from a group of authors led by David Beerling of the University of Sheffield argues the case that something that sounds a little wild-spreading crushed basalt over the world's croplands-could actually be pretty practical.
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