Climate Change Innovator Elected to National Academy

Much of Kelemen’s recent research has focused on Oman, an oil-rich sultanate on the Arabian Peninsula. In Oman’s Hajar Mountains, bordering Saudi Arabia, a chunk of earth’s mantle has wormed its way to the surface, exposing rocks normally buried miles below ground to the atmosphere. In contact with the air and nearby groundwater, these rocks react naturally with carbon dioxide to form carbonate, a solid, limestone-like material that locks carbon away forever.

Recent studies by Kelemen and colleagues show that these outcrops, covering an area the size of Massachusetts, have been rapidly socking away more carbon dioxide than previously thought — about 100,000 tons of carbon each year. “This rock from the earth’s interior is out of equilibrium with our atmosphere, and hungry for carbon dioxide,” Kelemen told Columbia Magazine in a recent profile. “We want to take advantage of that. This is chemical potential energy, as a geochemist would say. It’s there to be harnessed on a massive scale, if we can learn how to do it.” Kelemen and his colleague Juerg Matter, an adjunct scientist at Lamont-Doherty, are looking into the potential for drilling boreholes into Oman’s rocks and pumping large amounts of CO2-laced water underground. If the many economic and engineering hurdles can be overcome, it might be possible to lock away as much as 10 percent of the CO2 humans are now producing, says Kelemen. Photos and video from a recent research expedition to Oman can be viewed in this feature: Ancient Rocks, Modern Purpose.

Previous Earth Institute researchers elected to the National Academy include El Niño expert Mark Cane, volcanologist Terry Plank, climate scientist Wallace Broecker, paleomagnetism researcher Dennis Kent, paleontologist Paul Olsen, marine geophysicist Walter Pitman, seismologist Lynn Sykes and experimental petrologist David Walker, all from Lamont-Doherty; Ruth DeFries, an ecologist who heads Columbia’s Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology department, James Hansen, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, Sean Solomon, a geophysicist who is director of Lamont-Doherty and associate director of earth systems science at the Earth Institute, and Pedro Sanchez, an agronomist who heads the Earth Institute’s Agriculture and Food Security Center.