Rainforests are responsible for roughly one-third (28%) of the Earth’s oxygen but most (70%) of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by marine plants. The remaining 2 percent of Earth’s oxygen comes from other sources. The ocean produces oxygen through the plants (phytoplankton, kelp, and algal plankton) that live in it. These plants produce oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis, a process which converts carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugars the organism can use for energy. One type of phytoplankton, Prochlorococcus, releases countless tons of oxygen into the atmosphere. It is so small that millions can fit in a drop of water. Prochlorococcus has achieved fame as perhaps the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet. Dr. Sylvia A. Earle, a National Geographic Explorer, has estimated that Prochlorococcus provides the oxygen for one in every five breaths we take.
So, any investment for a project to replicate or enhance the natural production of breathable oxygen on Earth would have to be on the oceanic scale … :shock:
NASA says:
“Terraforming Mars using the planet’s known CO2 will thus need technologies well beyond our current grasp. Any such efforts have to be very far into the future.”
I was thinking more about removing the CO2 from earths atmosphere, because that seems to be the problem these days Omah, rather than producing oxygen, that would be just a beneficial by product…
Five cheap ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere
By Matt McGrath
25 October 2018
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others have all stated that extracting CO2 from the air will be needed if we are to bend the rising temperature curve before the end of this century.
These ideas are controversial with some seeing them as a distraction from the pressing business of limiting emissions of CO2.
A new assessment from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says that some of these “negative emissions technologies” are ready to be deployed, on a large scale, right now.
The authors point to the fact that the US Congress has recently passed the 45Q tax rule, which gives a $50 tax credit for every tonne of CO2 that’s captured and stored. So their study highlights some technologies that are available at between $20 and $100 per tonne.
1- Coastal blue carbon
2 - Planting trees
3 - Forest management
4 - Agricultural practices
5 - Biomass energy with carbon capture and storage
Pulling CO2 out of thin air
By Matt McGrath
15 November 2017
Extracting carbon dioxide from well mixed air is not just technically difficult, it’s expensive as well.
On the roof of a large recycling centre at Hinwil, Zurich, stand 18 metal fans, stacked on top of each, each about the size of a large domestic washing machine. These fans suck in the surrounding air and chemically coated filters inside absorb the CO2. They become saturated in a few hours so, using the waste heat from the recycling facility, the filters are heated up to 100C and very pure carbon dioxide gas is then collected.
This installation, called a direct-air capture system, has been developed by a Swiss company called Climeworks. It can capture about 900 tonnes of CO2 every year. It is then pumped to a large greenhouse a few hundred metres away, where it helps grow bigger vegetables.
Right now Climeworks is selling the gas to the vegetable growers next door for $600 per tonne, which is very expensive. The firm believes that like solar and wind energy, costs will rapidly fall once production is scaled up.
One of the things about CO2 that makes it attractive for developers is that it has many uses in the world. From fish food to concrete; from car seats to toothpaste - entrepreneurs are trying to use carbon dioxide as a raw material. There’s also a roaring trade in CO2 in the US, where it’s being used, without irony, to boost the extraction of oil from wells. One of the most ambitious plans is to extract CO2 and turn it into fuel. Driving down the price of capturing CO2 is key to making this idea work.
Making fuel or other products out of CO2 might help but it won’t achieve the type of large scale take-down from the atmosphere that many scientists now fear will be necessary over the next 20-30 years if the goals of the Paris climate agreement are to be met.
The US space agency’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter has now made its third successful flight on the Red Planet.
On Sunday, the little chopper rose to a height of 5m before speeding off laterally for 50m - half the length of a football field. Ingenuity then came back to its take-off spot, for a total flight time of 80 seconds. This video, acquired by the Perseverance rover, shows the drone rise from the ground and move right, out of view and then return to land.
All plants need CO2 to exist Omah !!
So if we remove all CO2, Don't we kill all plants as well ??
The inverse is true of all animals, they need the oxygen that plants
produce to exist !!
And so ALL life is nterdependant !!
You can't have one without the other ??
Have the vegans thought this through ??
Donkeyman!
Space junk a problem that could jeopardize future space missions.
Thousands of human-made objects orbit earth and the majority of them no longer work. There’s a risk this space debris could collide with functioning satellites, which provide vital services like GPS and weather warnings.
To track and predict its behaviour, Prof Moriba Jah and his colleagues built AstriaGraph – a near real-time map of where each object is located in space. He explains that the system is monitoring around 200 ‘super-spreaders’ – large rocket bodies that have the potential to break into thousands of pieces.
Sorry Cinders but we’ve been here before…
Judging by that BBC graphic it puts those pieces of space junk about the size of Guernsey…:shock: Massively out of context…
All the space junk could be collected on a couple of football pitches. People have no concept just how big space is…
Satellites orbit at all different heights, the chances of bumping into a piece of space junk large enough to damage a satellite is millions to one…
At 33 feet! The problem occurred after one of the pictures taken by the helicopter’s on-board camera failed to register in its navigation system, causing the aircraft to suddenly lurch in confusion.
Nope!
The machine controls itself by dead reckoning via cameras etc !!
Any messages from earth take too long to get there and so would
be too late for the machine to react in time ??
The InSight lander’s job is to detect these quakes with its seismometer, which it’s been doing since February 2019. The instrument provides scientists with extremely rich seismic data on two phenomena in particular: the P-waves and S-waves that marsquakes produce. “P-waves are compressional waves, like sound in air, and they are the fastest waves that we see moving through any planetary body,” says University of Cologne seismologist Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun, lead author on the paper that modeled Mars’ crust. “And then we have the secondary waves, the S-waves, the shear waves. The motion is more like if you pluck a string on a guitar and it swings.”
