does this remind anyone else of the projects undertaken by the sand people in āDuneā?
There has been global warming before in prehistoric times. It was reversed by the Azolla Event.
The Azolla event occurred in the middle Eocene epoch,1 around 49 million years ago, when blooms of the freshwater fern Azolla are thought to have happened in the Arctic Ocean. As they sank to the stagnant sea floor, they were incorporated into the sediment; the resulting draw down of carbon dioxide has been speculated to have helped transform the planet from a āgreenhouse Earthā state, hot enough for turtles and palm trees to prosper at the poles, to the icehouse Earth it has been since.
Anyway hereās the important quote:
With 800,000 years of Azolla bloom episodes and a 4,000,000 kmĀ²
basin to cover, even by very conservative estimates more than enough
carbon could be sequestered by plant burial to account for the observed
80% drop in CO2 by this one phenomenon alone.
Gosh, I had never heard of the āAzolla Eventā. Thanks for that.
Itās cheering but a bit depressing too. If things happened as they thing, the azolla may have reversed global warming, but in doing this it killed itself and destroyed its habitat, and left a lot of carbon based stuff hanging around ready to trigger another global warming event. If you are off to Hudson Bay with a bucket of azolla, make sure someone keeps an eye on it this timeā¦
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