subject: Assumption About Basalt In 1889 [print this page] Rising on the west side of the lower Hudson River for 20 miles in New Jersey and New York, the towering Palisades are actually the visible remnants of enormous floods of magma that flowed hot about 200 million years ago, cooling into a vast expanse of basalt that extends to Europe, Africa and South America, much of it buried deep under the Atlantic Ocean.
Early Dutch New Yorkers called the staircase-like basalt of the Palisades "trap rock"; not because it trapped anything, but after their native word for "step". But a new scientific analysis suggests that the related basalt formations buried under the U.S. east coast and extending out to sea might someday be doing some critical trapping after allof greenhouse gas emissions from the likes of giant coal-burning power plants.
The analysis, published this month in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that expanses of basalts along and just beyond the heavily populated east coast might be ideal for locking-up billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2).
Advocates of "clean coal" technology see carbon sequestrationcapturing and then storing CO2 deep undergroundas a way for the world to keep burning the cheap and abundant fossil fuel without aggravating global warming. Whether carbon capture and storage will ever turn out to be economically or environmentally feasible remains open to often-fierce debate. But the prospect of injecting CO2 into basalt formations could at least resolve one major fear: that the gas might eventually escape to the surface.
