“We have to move mountains,” Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told the Chronicle, discussing the magnitude of the climate change crisis facing humanity. Then he clarified that he was not speaking metaphorically: “We have to smash mountains. We literally have to smash mountains and move them into the ocean.”
Crushing rock, mountains of it, and mixing it into the ocean is one of the most appealing methods of addressing climate change, scientists like Keeling believe. The process, called “ocean alkalinity enhancement,” increases the alkalinity of the surface of the ocean, allowing it to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere.
Most people know that forests and jungles absorb huge amounts of the CO2 given off by the burning of fossil fuels. In fact, such so-called carbon sinks remove 10 gigatons of the 53 gigatons of carbon released every year. Most don’t realize, however, that the oceans also absorb the same amount.
Matthew Long, the CEO and founder of [C]Worthy, is working to ensure that the oceans absorb more. As he explained at a Monday SXSW panel called The Quest to Capture Carbon and Bend the Curve, Long’s nonprofit is developing tools that would assist ocean alkalinity enhancement enterprises by measuring how much carbon they capture. Long emphasized that, because of the vast amount of CO2 that is already present in the atmosphere, simply lowering emissions will not fix climate change. “Ultimately, there will be a requirement to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere,” Long told the audience, “and growing the scale of that removal is something that we have to do.”
Mina Zarabian joined the panel to discuss the work of Carbonova, a company she founded that has developed a process to remove carbon from CO2 emissions and use it to improve plastics and other products.
“The plastic that you see that is black has solid carbon in it,” Zarabian explained. “We use it in the interior of cars, tires, electronics, sporting goods. That carbon is produced from fossil fuels or minerals, from graphite from the earth, and that has a very high CO2 footprint. So we asked ourselves, ‘If the world needs a lot of elemental carbon, why don’t we use the carbon dioxide from the emissions?’”
Zarabian said her company has designed a process that takes CO2 and removes the carbon molecules from the gases to create a material with a variety of valuable mechanical and thermal properties. The material can be produced alongside greenhouse gas-emitting operations, very cheaply and cleanly.
The “bending the curve” in the panel’s title is a reference to the Keeling Curve, a measurement of the ever-increasing amount of carbon that has saturated the upper atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Keeling Curve is named after Ralph Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, who first began to recognize that carbon was increasing after first measuring its presence in the atmosphere in the 1950s. The elder Keeling continued to assemble the curve for almost 40 years, providing the foundation for the science of climate change. The younger Keeling said that in this day and age it is more of a challenge to engage in decades of long-term research, but that he is dedicated to continuing his father’s legacy. And one of his biggest goals is to see the Keeling Curve begin to flatten.
“I’m kind of hopeful that this might happen in the next decade or so,” Keeling said, “that if fossil fuel burning doesn’t keep going up, but rather peaks, we’ll see a change in the shape of the curve. But what we really want to do is get emissions all the way to zero. At that point, the curve will not only peak but it will actually be starting down.”
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This article appears in March 14 • 2025.
