CO2 tagged posts

Examples of Martian Gullies. Until recently they were thought to have been sculpted by flowing liquid water, but they may result from defrosting dry ice processes at the end of winter. On the right, gullies on dunes in Russel Crater (54.3°S-12.9°E) are partially covered by CO2 ice. On the left, sinous gullies in a Crater in Newton Basin (41°S-202°E) Credit: Image courtesy of CNRS

Mars’s gullies may be formed by dry ice processes rather than flowing liquid water, as previously thought. Scientists show that, during late winter and spring, underneath the seasonal CO2 ice layer heated by the sun, intense gas fluxes can destabilize the regolith material and induce gas-lubricated debris flows which look like water-sculpted gullies on Earth...

New work demonstrates the planet’s remaining fossil fuel resources would be sufficient to melt nearly all of Antarctica if burned, leading to a 160 to 200 ft rise in sea level. Because so many major cities are at or near sea level, this would put many highly populated areas where more than a billion people live under water, including NYC and DC.

“Our findings show that if we do not want to melt Antarctica, we can’t keep taking fossil fuel carbon out of the ground and just dumping it into the atmosphere as CO2 like we’ve been doing,” Caldeira said. “Most previous studies of Antarctic have focused on loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Our study demonstrates that burning coal, oil, and gas also risks loss of the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

Although Antarctica has already b...

This view combines information from two instruments on a NASA Mars orbiter to map color-coded composition over the shape of the ground within the Nili Fossae plains region of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL/Univ. of Arizona

How did Mars change from a world with water billions of years ago to the arid Red Planet of today. A new analysis of the largest known deposit of carbonate minerals on Mars suggests that the original Martian atmosphere may have already lost most of its CO2 by the era of valley network formation.

Carbon dioxide makes up most of the Martian atmosphere. That gas can be pulled out of the air and sequestered or pulled into the ground by chemical reactions with rocks to form carbonate minerals...

Conceptual model shows how porphyrin COFs embedded in a cathode could be used to split carbon dioxide (CO2) into carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen for making renewable fuels and other valuable chemical products. Credit: Courtesy of Omar Yaghi, Berkeley Lab/UC Berkeley

Porphyrin CO2 catalysts have been incorporated into the sponge-like crystals of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) to create a molecular system that not only absorbs carbon dioxide, but also selectively reduces it to CO, a primary building block for a wide range of chemical products including fuels, pharmaceuticals and plastics.

With the reduction of atmospheric CO2 emissions in mind, Yaghi and his MIU group designed and developed the first COFs as a means of separating CO2 from flue gases...