Thats what Portland residents tell me, and my barbecue ashes mix well in my garden areas. Plant life seems to thrive in Portland.
You have to wonder if man is really capable of replacing the function of plants. Seems like a really basic connection between plants and animals, we give them CO2 and they give us O2 and food. It does not seem like pumping CO2 into caverns is "mother nature". Do minerals really have the same potential for processing CO2? Research is great, but limiting CO2 emissions seems more practical. CO2 issues aside... Conservation seems to be being downplayed, too bad government did not take steps 20 years ago. Erik Well...
Calling what came out of Mt. Saint Helens "ash" is a misnomer. It's really a collection of oxides of silica, aluminum, iron, etc. It's basically a bunch of highly abrasive, low-density glass and is pretty nasty stuff.
Are you sure about the gardens benefiting from this?
I'm betting that only way that what fell on Portland would be a beneficial carbon-rich "ash" is if forest fires associated with the eruption mingled their genuine ash with the volcanic fallout. I don't know if that happened or not.
On the subject of using mother nature as a long-term storage facility for unwanted carbon (or CO2), there has just been some pretty cool research published showing the complex and surprisingly effective ways that the waters in the vicinity of the mouth of the Amazon river are fixing atmospheric CO2 and locking them up in plant matter.
http://www.physorg.com/news135878497.html
Also, NPR's "Science Friday" program this past week had an interview with a researcher who proposes piping liquid CO2 from west coast power plants to subterranean caverns _far beneath the Pacific Ocean_ and using the pressure of the ocean to help force the CO2 to bind with minerals in these caverns to form limestone deposits.
You can listen to the program via the web at
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92921956
Enjoy!
Seth
-----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of erikhansen@TheBlueZone.net Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 11:47 AM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Why not just the carbon?
Portland received a couple of feet of that charcoal (volcanic ash) when Mt St Helens went off. The gardens there really benefited from that.
My reply didn't answer Patrick's question. But I can offer this detail on
sequestering only the carbon without the oxygen:
I heard a recent interview with a scientist on NPR, who advocates using charcoal (relatively pure carbon) as a soil ammendment worldwide. It has the double bonus of both enriching the soil by capturing nutrients, as well as sequestering carbon. Charcoal is produced by heating organic material in an oxygen-poor environment, so one doesn't produce greenhouse-gasses and pollution the way burning the material would. It can be made using sealed solar-heated vessels, and is stable for tens of thousands of years once produced.
After hearing this, I purchased a couple bags of commercially made BBQ charcoal, pulverized it with a small sledge hammer, and used it in my vegetable garden this spring. Those bags of charcoal will never be burned- the scientist (who had a strong Chinese accent) said that regular BBQ charcoal was ideal for this purpose if broken down into smaller size pieces. Something I noticed is that BBQ charcoal is surprisingly hard. It took a lot of beating to reduce the size of those chunks. Using a rock tumbler or some kind of crusher mill would be easier, provided powering it didn't release more carbon than the charcoal being broken-down.
Too early to tell if the charcoal has had positive results as far as a soil ammendment, I've got good soil to begin with. I also didn't use as much as the scientist recommended per unit area, because of cost and time factors. I might do a couple of bags per year until I'm too old to do it anymore.
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 8:59 AM, Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> wrote:
From what I've read, terrestrial carbon sinks are a tiny fraction of the capacity of oceanic sinks. Also, anything humans do in the way of re-forestation or other sequestration is a drop in the bucket compared to the coal tonnage and crude oil volumes brought to the surface and burned.
_______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://gallery.utahastronomy.com Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com
_______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://gallery.utahastronomy.com Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com
_______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://gallery.utahastronomy.com Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com