And states the main problem, with a deep ocean detonation, would be fallout.
I’m not sure that’s right. The shockwave of a bomb that insane could easily have seismic and tsunami effects. Probably be the biggest mass of dead fish floating at the surface, too.
Should probably talk to some geologists first.
UnfortunateDoorHinge@aussie.zone
on 13 Feb 14:29
collapse
perhaps, though you’d have to dig a much bigger hole. however, the paper points out that the sheer military uselessness of such an enormous bomb would be crucial to making it legal or politically feasible. the international community would be understandably sus of anyone wanting to make 1620 tsar bombas.
sober_monk@lemmy.world
on 11 Feb 16:19
nextcollapse
Thanks for the link, interesting read! I know that a good paper is succint, but honestly, I thought that making the case for a gigaton-yield nuclear explosion to combat climate change would take more than four pages…
TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
on 12 Feb 21:11
collapse
Study conclusion: YOLO
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 11 Feb 16:37
collapse
You either spend a truckload of resources during decades to make a bomb that explodes releasing the same energy humanity spends in two months, or you spend a truckload of resources doing the end task at a slower pace for decades.
The later is guaranteed to require a smaller truckload.
Why is the second guaranteed to be smaller?
We know how nuclear bombs work. The majority of the energy comes from nuclear fusion, a highly exothermic process, that can (in the foreseeable future) only be used in bombs.
If we don’t need to drop the bomb, but rather assemble it in place, it can just use deuterium as a fusion fuel. Deuterium can be distilled from normal water for much less energy that it generates in fusion.
Edit: mixed up fusion and fission in the first statement
It does in modern designs, the first time it happened was in 1952.
To quote Wikipedia:
The first thermonuclear weapon detonation, where the vast majority of the yield comes from fusion, was the 1952 Ivy Mike test of a liquid deuterium-fusing device.
Government is fine. Remember money is just IOUs from the government, if billionaires assets were sold and the money went to government it would be deflationary, all money in circulation would become more valuable
HappySkullsplitter@lemmy.world
on 11 Feb 16:22
nextcollapse
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit
Seems half-baked. Well unbaked really. They make a shit ton of assumptions that I’m not sure are true.
For example, why do they assume 90% pulverization efficiency of the basalt? Or is that a number they just pulled out of their ass?
And does ERW work if the pulverized rock is in a big pile on the sea floor? Or would we have to dig the highly radioactive area up and spread it around the surface?
And does the radioactive water truly stay at the site of the explosion? Or will it be spread through the entire ocean via currents?
Cool concept but, like, maybe we should check the assumptions a little harder?
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
on 11 Feb 17:15
nextcollapse
And does ERW work if the pulverized rock is in a big pile on the sea floor? Or would we have to dig the highly radioactive area up and spread it around the surface?
Yeah… Doesn’t the carbon sequestering happen from rain absorbing carbon in the atmosphere and then attaching to the rock to mineralize it? Something tells me 6-7 km of ocean might impede that process.
And does the radioactive water truly stay at the site of the explosion? Or will it be spread through the entire ocean via currents?
The ocean dissolves a large amount of CO2, which then, just like in the rain example, can react with minerals. It can react faster if there is more surface area of said minerals.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
on 11 Feb 20:17
collapse
Do you know if Co2 that dissolves into water is less buoyant, or is it held in suspension? Or is this relying on the sediment being suspended in the ocean for a while before being deposited back on the ocean floor?
I am not sure if I understand you. Dissolved CO2 in water of like normal water. There is no crazy difference. If water can get to the rocks, so can the dissolved CO2.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
on 11 Feb 20:52
collapse
There is no crazy difference. If water can get to the rocks, so can the dissolved CO2.
Oh, I was just pondering the efficiency. If Co2 is held in suspension and only the top layer of sediment is going to be exposed to the carbon in the water, and not to a degree of co2 more concentrated than normal.
They expect the pulverised rock to be spread by the blast and distributed on ocean currents, the CO2 is throughout the water column, it moves over concentration gradients, if one volume of water has 1g/L and another has 3g/L then CO2 will move from the 3g/L bit into 1g/L bit until they are in balance
I think they hope the pulverised rock will be spread so it works quicker, not having to wait for CO2 to balance
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
on 13 Feb 13:54
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Also would it kill all the sea life leading to a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions from all the decomposing fish corpses? Does undersea decomposition release greenhouse gases?
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Feb 21:29
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And doesn’t plankton already sequester CO2 on the ocean floor when it dies?
TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
on 12 Feb 21:14
collapse
Oh right. The solution of course is a bigger bomb.
shittydwarf@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Feb 16:35
nextcollapse
The last time I checked, we don’t have a whole lot of climate solutions that feature the bomb. And I’d be doing myself a disservice… and every member of this species, if I didn’t nuke the HELL out of this!
SparrowHawk@feddit.it
on 11 Feb 16:37
nextcollapse
That would just make the molepeople mad and double our problems
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 11 Feb 16:43
nextcollapse
This is by far the most practical “geoengineering” solution I’ve seen, far better than aerosols over the arctic, space shades or whatever. The ecological damage is comparatively miniscules.
And even then… quite a engineering feat. Nukes are actually “cheap” to scale up (a small bomb can catalyze big, cheap cores), but burying that much volume “3-5 km into the basalt-rich seafloor” is not something anyone is set-up to do.
But by far the hardest part is… information. Much of the world doesn’t even believe in climate change anymore, and by the time they do, it will be too late.
MrPoopyButthole@lemmy.world
on 11 Feb 17:03
nextcollapse
Drivel…
magnetosphere@fedia.io
on 11 Feb 17:15
nextcollapse
FoolishObserver@lemmy.world
on 11 Feb 18:44
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No: this was about how the US Government considered underground nuking Alaska for the coal, killing cattle to check for cancer, and having people believe it was aliens. I was at work, so I may have missed a few points, but there was a discussion on power via turbine powered by nuclear weapon melted salt.
Re-naming all the Great Lakes to Lake America (with the easy to remember acronym “AAAAA!”) was one of the late night shows.
SpaceRanger13@lemm.ee
on 11 Feb 17:50
nextcollapse
Uh oh. What an apropos American way to go.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Feb 19:06
nextcollapse
I mean… if we’re being honest, the long-term effects of global thermonuclear war would be (very eventual) carbon sequestration in tens to hundreds of millions of years, and then we’ll renew our oil reserves! We of course won’t be around to use them, seeing as we’ll have been sequestered into the oil.
Can we get new oil actually? I thought we now have organisms that can break down every organic matter and thus it can not really accumulate anymore?
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Feb 21:26
nextcollapse
Oil actually comes from aquatic life (mostly plankton) that sinks to the sea floor and gets buried, squeezed and heated. Oil still forms today, but it’s a process of millions of years.
Coal is formed from plants, and that does indeed require something doesn’t eat it first. Swamps, for example, help a lot, letting the fallen trees sink down where most stuff can’t eat it. Peat can also form into coal. Coal forms even slower than oil though, and it’s much rarer, but it also doesn’t require an ocean, so it’s often more accessible for us land-living humans
IIRC, all that coal comes from plant material from before there were microbes that can break down cellulose. Meaning that while it’s possible to regenerate oil over millions of years, coal cannot.
So yes, there may be more of it now, but when we burn it, it’s gone forever.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
on 12 Feb 03:07
nextcollapse
There’s an abiotic pathway that creates new oil geologically. It’s a very small amount.
The theory is popular in Russia, where it’s claimed to be the main way oil is produced. That’s complete bullshit. It turned out there is some, but not enough to matter.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
on 11 Feb 20:45
collapse
Another cycle, another life. Same shithole planet.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Feb 19:13
nextcollapse
I’m pulling for artificial diamonds. It’s the funniest solution: dumping truckloads of precious gemstones back down empty wells. Or burying them in the desert. Or I guess just handing them out for industrial uses, since even grinding them to dust isn’t the same problem as CO2. Have a free bucket of aquarium gravel, made out of worthless tacky gold.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Feb 21:28
collapse
Hey, if you can make diamond that easily, we can exchange a LOT of substances for it. Not just windows and glasses, but pretty much every ceramic object, insulators, but also just toilets (slap some paint on it and done).
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Feb 00:26
collapse
Drop a plate, floor breaks.
Hikermick@lemmy.world
on 11 Feb 21:05
nextcollapse
Just spitballing here. These grand ideas good/bad practical/or not are the beginning of mankind learning how to geo engineer planets or moons. I’ll be long dead before I get proven right or wrong so it’s easy to spitball
peoplebeproblems@midwest.social
on 11 Feb 21:21
nextcollapse
I think y’all are missing the point here.
It’s really to justify the production and testing of an insanely large planet altering weapon that would create a really cool firework.
Carbon sequestration is not going to solve global warming. CO2 is less than 2% of atmosphere. Even if you pass a shitton of air through the strata the difference will be negligible.
I don’t know. What do you think is the concentration of CO2 in the sea water? I am just not convinced.
piccolo@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Feb 18:09
nextcollapse
The biggest threat of co2 emmisions is ocean acidifcation. A collapse of the ocean ecosystem would be devastating to the rest of the planet. A warmer planet sucks, but dead phytoplankton would result in a global plumment in O2 production.
The concentration isn’t as important as the difficulty to remove it. It’s still a hard problem, but rock weathering is one way to accomplish it, but it would need a lot of exposed rock surface.
Not just a lot of exposed rock surface. But also, there are energy costs for pumping water to the exposed surface. Factoring in the efficiency of the carbon removal from the water, I find it hard to believe it is a good solution.
Wouldn’t it be better if we focus on better sources of energy? I am no expert, but I know about it more than a common man due to my academic background in civil engineering.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
on 12 Feb 18:09
nextcollapse
I’ve got my fingers crossed for a Snowpiercer set up.
SabinStargem@lemmings.world
on 13 Feb 02:12
nextcollapse
I guess Trump could add a new canal to the Red Sea, as per an old proposal involving nukes to dig it. Considering this administration, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
threaded - newest
I love fusion explosions, I love fission explosions.
I love the blogosphere
Paper is here: arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06623
wow, and the bomb only needs a yield of 1620 times the largest nuclear bomb ever deployed.
“Nuclear explosions are inherently unsafe”
Well, he warns about it.
Nuclear explosions are inherently unsafe…
…but fuck them fish!
“Barren seafloor”
“That’s what we call your mom Kevin!”
[citation needed]
And states the main problem, with a deep ocean detonation, would be fallout.
I’m not sure that’s right. The shockwave of a bomb that insane could easily have seismic and tsunami effects. Probably be the biggest mass of dead fish floating at the surface, too.
Should probably talk to some geologists first.
Give some ear plugs to the whales
Would 1,620 of those bombs work instead?
perhaps, though you’d have to dig a much bigger hole. however, the paper points out that the sheer military uselessness of such an enormous bomb would be crucial to making it legal or politically feasible. the international community would be understandably sus of anyone wanting to make 1620 tsar bombas.
Thanks for the link, interesting read! I know that a good paper is succint, but honestly, I thought that making the case for a gigaton-yield nuclear explosion to combat climate change would take more than four pages…
Study conclusion: YOLO
It’s quite light on details.
Every proposal to save the world ultimately comes back to the plot of The Core
You mean the smash hit 2003 documentary The Core?
Yes, by plot I of course mean those things that happened
Well, I’m sure controlled slow-paced mining is more energy efficient and will emit less carbon to create…
But I’m not stopping that guy. Go on. I’ll just watch from a safe distance.
Going of the value in the paper and wikipedia it would take the energy used by all of humanity in two months.
You either spend a truckload of resources during decades to make a bomb that explodes releasing the same energy humanity spends in two months, or you spend a truckload of resources doing the end task at a slower pace for decades.
The later is guaranteed to require a smaller truckload.
Why is the second guaranteed to be smaller?
We know how nuclear bombs work. The majority of the energy comes from nuclear fusion, a highly exothermic process, that can (in the foreseeable future) only be used in bombs.
If we don’t need to drop the bomb, but rather assemble it in place, it can just use deuterium as a fusion fuel. Deuterium can be distilled from normal water for much less energy that it generates in fusion.
Edit: mixed up fusion and fission in the first statement
Yes, from an extremely inefficient fission reaction that can be improved by an order of magnitude by doing it slowly in a reactor.
Mixed up fission and fusion there, they sound so similar in English.
The comment talks about fusion.
Most of the energy does not come from fusion.
It does in modern designs, the first time it happened was in 1952.
To quote Wikipedia:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion
Gotta nuke somethin’.
The only way that works is if all the oil execs are in ground zero.
I have a similar modest proposal to solving the wealth inequality hoarding problem of billionaires
Someone needs to work out the inheritance fallout. With our luck it will still fall within the same families, or the government.
Government is fine. Remember money is just IOUs from the government, if billionaires assets were sold and the money went to government it would be deflationary, all money in circulation would become more valuable
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit
It’s the only way to be sure
No more climate change if no more climate!
Seems half-baked. Well unbaked really. They make a shit ton of assumptions that I’m not sure are true.
For example, why do they assume 90% pulverization efficiency of the basalt? Or is that a number they just pulled out of their ass?
And does ERW work if the pulverized rock is in a big pile on the sea floor? Or would we have to dig the highly radioactive area up and spread it around the surface?
And does the radioactive water truly stay at the site of the explosion? Or will it be spread through the entire ocean via currents?
Cool concept but, like, maybe we should check the assumptions a little harder?
Yeah… Doesn’t the carbon sequestering happen from rain absorbing carbon in the atmosphere and then attaching to the rock to mineralize it? Something tells me 6-7 km of ocean might impede that process.
Dilution is the solution…ocean big?
Dilution was supposed to be the solution to the whole greenhouse gasses emissions, turns out atmosphere not … that big.
The ocean dissolves a large amount of CO2, which then, just like in the rain example, can react with minerals. It can react faster if there is more surface area of said minerals.
Do you know if Co2 that dissolves into water is less buoyant, or is it held in suspension? Or is this relying on the sediment being suspended in the ocean for a while before being deposited back on the ocean floor?
I am not sure if I understand you. Dissolved CO2 in water of like normal water. There is no crazy difference. If water can get to the rocks, so can the dissolved CO2.
Oh, I was just pondering the efficiency. If Co2 is held in suspension and only the top layer of sediment is going to be exposed to the carbon in the water, and not to a degree of co2 more concentrated than normal.
Every bit that is in contact with water is also in contact with CO2.
They expect the pulverised rock to be spread by the blast and distributed on ocean currents, the CO2 is throughout the water column, it moves over concentration gradients, if one volume of water has 1g/L and another has 3g/L then CO2 will move from the 3g/L bit into 1g/L bit until they are in balance
I think they hope the pulverised rock will be spread so it works quicker, not having to wait for CO2 to balance
Thanks, that makes things make a bit more sense.
Some people would literally rather nuke the planet than take a train to work…
Also would it kill all the sea life leading to a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions from all the decomposing fish corpses? Does undersea decomposition release greenhouse gases?
And doesn’t plankton already sequester CO2 on the ocean floor when it dies?
Oh right. The solution of course is a bigger bomb.
The last time I checked, we don’t have a whole lot of climate solutions that feature the bomb. And I’d be doing myself a disservice… and every member of this species, if I didn’t nuke the HELL out of this!
That would just make the molepeople mad and double our problems
They already hate us surface dwellers!
This is by far the most practical “geoengineering” solution I’ve seen, far better than aerosols over the arctic, space shades or whatever. The ecological damage is comparatively miniscules.
And even then… quite a engineering feat. Nukes are actually “cheap” to scale up (a small bomb can catalyze big, cheap cores), but burying that much volume “3-5 km into the basalt-rich seafloor” is not something anyone is set-up to do.
But by far the hardest part is… information. Much of the world doesn’t even believe in climate change anymore, and by the time they do, it will be too late.
Drivel…
This is “nuke the hurricane”-level science.
No, absolutely not. This is increasing the surface area and availability of rocks that take up CO2.
By “level”, I’m talking about the practicality and wisdom of the idea.
It is not comparable.
I feel like the podcast Behind The Bastards talked about this in the episode released today.
Did they talk about nuking the great lakes again?
No: this was about how the US Government considered underground nuking Alaska for the coal, killing cattle to check for cancer, and having people believe it was aliens. I was at work, so I may have missed a few points, but there was a discussion on power via turbine powered by nuclear weapon melted salt.
Re-naming all the Great Lakes to Lake America (with the easy to remember acronym “AAAAA!”) was one of the late night shows.
Uh oh. What an apropos American way to go.
I mean… if we’re being honest, the long-term effects of global thermonuclear war would be (very eventual) carbon sequestration in tens to hundreds of millions of years, and then we’ll renew our oil reserves! We of course won’t be around to use them, seeing as we’ll have been sequestered into the oil.
Being sequestered into the oil sounds pretty nice at this point.
Can we get new oil actually? I thought we now have organisms that can break down every organic matter and thus it can not really accumulate anymore?
Oil actually comes from aquatic life (mostly plankton) that sinks to the sea floor and gets buried, squeezed and heated. Oil still forms today, but it’s a process of millions of years.
Coal is formed from plants, and that does indeed require something doesn’t eat it first. Swamps, for example, help a lot, letting the fallen trees sink down where most stuff can’t eat it. Peat can also form into coal. Coal forms even slower than oil though, and it’s much rarer, but it also doesn’t require an ocean, so it’s often more accessible for us land-living humans
Coal is much rarer than oil? I have to look that up, I always thought there is far more coal.
Nope, there is about 3x more coal than oil.
IIRC, all that coal comes from plant material from before there were microbes that can break down cellulose. Meaning that while it’s possible to regenerate oil over millions of years, coal cannot.
So yes, there may be more of it now, but when we burn it, it’s gone forever.
If you squeeze a baby hard enough
There’s an abiotic pathway that creates new oil geologically. It’s a very small amount.
The theory is popular in Russia, where it’s claimed to be the main way oil is produced. That’s complete bullshit. It turned out there is some, but not enough to matter.
Another cycle, another life. Same shithole planet.
I’m pulling for artificial diamonds. It’s the funniest solution: dumping truckloads of precious gemstones back down empty wells. Or burying them in the desert. Or I guess just handing them out for industrial uses, since even grinding them to dust isn’t the same problem as CO2. Have a free bucket of aquarium gravel, made out of worthless tacky gold.
Hey, if you can make diamond that easily, we can exchange a LOT of substances for it. Not just windows and glasses, but pretty much every ceramic object, insulators, but also just toilets (slap some paint on it and done).
Drop a plate, floor breaks.
Just spitballing here. These grand ideas good/bad practical/or not are the beginning of mankind learning how to geo engineer planets or moons. I’ll be long dead before I get proven right or wrong so it’s easy to spitball
I think y’all are missing the point here.
It’s really to justify the production and testing of an insanely large planet altering weapon that would create a really cool firework.
The only way to convince conservatives to fight climate change is if we do it with guns and bombs
If it gets the job done, I’m willing to make that compromise.
Actually, one of their feasibility assumptions is that the device is too large to be used militarily.
arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1#%3A~%3Atext=Confronti….
Ah. I suppose building an 81 gigaton nuclear weapon wouldn’t be small.
Let’s fire up the antimatter then!
I think they underestimate a military’s desire to use all of the things that go boom.
Carbon sequestration is not going to solve global warming. CO2 is less than 2% of atmosphere. Even if you pass a shitton of air through the strata the difference will be negligible.
Water absorbs a lot of co2 and removing it from the water via weathering is a valid idea.
I don’t know. What do you think is the concentration of CO2 in the sea water? I am just not convinced.
The biggest threat of co2 emmisions is ocean acidifcation. A collapse of the ocean ecosystem would be devastating to the rest of the planet. A warmer planet sucks, but dead phytoplankton would result in a global plumment in O2 production.
The concentration isn’t as important as the difficulty to remove it. It’s still a hard problem, but rock weathering is one way to accomplish it, but it would need a lot of exposed rock surface.
Not just a lot of exposed rock surface. But also, there are energy costs for pumping water to the exposed surface. Factoring in the efficiency of the carbon removal from the water, I find it hard to believe it is a good solution.
Wouldn’t it be better if we focus on better sources of energy? I am no expert, but I know about it more than a common man due to my academic background in civil engineering.
I’ve got my fingers crossed for a Snowpiercer set up.
I guess Trump could add a new canal to the Red Sea, as per an old proposal involving nukes to dig it. Considering this administration, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
The point is that it’s a passive process, not an active one. No need for pumping.
Water is so much denser than air that you do get more exposure time per unit time.
<img alt="" src="https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/dec8fb8e-ad42-4897-a754-299699e25959.png">
www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=12…
Dare to dream.