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Very little organic carbon actually reaches the seafloor, though, because it is remineralised while sinking through the water column. Then, most of the organic

Very little organic carbon actually reaches the seafloor, though, because it is remineralised while sinking through the water column. Then, most of the organic matter that actually does reach the seafloor is similarly remineralised rather than buried. But say we did manage to get massive amounts of organic matter into the deep ocean, we could feasibly end up creating a so-called "dead zone" that is depleted in oxygen like we see elsewhere in the ocean, which would be detrimental to deep sea life.

grues-dinner 2y ago
I didn't say it's a good idea, or even that it actually works, just that it's one of the few schemes that I could even be convinced has some hope of even presenting two-digit gigatonnes of carbon to some reaction of interest a year. Which is what you'd need to be doing in the face of 40Gt/yr emissions. Processing millions upon millions of cubic kilometres (top 5m of the sea is a bit under 2 million) through machinery just screams science fiction or greenwashing to me, simply based on "you want how many pipes?!". Current human water use is 4000km^3/yr: so it's 500 times more than that to cycle the water once. If we could build that much processing infrastructure, we could just build decarbonised generation capacity in the first place. IEA estimates that 150ish GW of nuclear power would displace 1Gt, or maybe 600GW of solar. That's way less than pumps and handling plants for 100 Lake Baikals per year. China installed a third of that in just solar this year. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-direct-co2-emissions-avoided-per-1-gw-of-installed-capacity-by-technology-and-displaced-fuel https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-direct...