Key to Speeding Up Carbon Sequestration Discovered

Caltech News tagged with "astronomy + exoplanets + JPL + planetary_science"

Scientists at Caltech and USC have discovered a way to speed up the slow part of the chemical reaction that ultimately helps the earth to safely lock away, or sequester, carbon dioxide into the ocean. Simply adding a common enzyme to the mix, the researchers have found, can make that rate-limiting part of the process go 500 times faster. A paper about the work appears online the week of July 17 ahead of publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."While the new paper is about a basic chemical mechanism, the implication is that we might better mimic the natural process that stores carbon dioxide in the ocean," says lead author Adam Subhas, a Caltech graduate student and Resnick Sustainability Fellow.The research is a collaboration between the labs of Jess Adkins from Caltech and Will Berelson of USC. The team used isotopic labeling and two methods for measuring isotope ratios in solutions and solids to study calcite—a form of calcium carbonate—dissolving in seawater and measure how fast it occurs at a molecular level.It all started with a very simple, very basic problem: measuring how long it takes for calcite to dissolve in seawater. "Although a seemingly straightforward problem, the kinetics of the reaction is poorly understood," says Berelson, professor of earth sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.Calcite is a mineral made of calcium, carbon, and oxygen that is more commonly known as the sedimentary precursor to limestone and marble. In the ocean, calcite is a sediment formed from the shells of organisms, like plankton, that have died and sunk to the seafloor. Calcium carbonate is also the material that makes up coral reefs—the exoskeleton of the coral polyp.As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen past 400 parts per million—a symbolic benchmark for climate scientists confirming that the ...

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