Ros Rickaby, Sophie Gill, Roxana Shafiee and Myles Allen in conversation: "CO2 solutions: ocean carbon storage options"

22 March 2021

Portrait of Professor Myles Allen

with Professor Myles Allen
Professor of Geosystem Science

Myles Allen is Head of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics in the Department of Physics, University of Oxford, and Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment. His research focuses on how human and natural inf...

Portrait of Professor Ros Rickaby

with Professor Ros Rickaby
Chair of Geology at Oxford Earth Sciences

Throughout her research career, Ros has aimed to bring life to geochemistry! Ros has pioneered an interdisciplinary blend of biology and chemistry to resolve questions of past climates, evolution, and the future of the phytoplankton. The feedback bet...

The modern ocean contains an enormous (38000 GtC) reservoir of carbon in dissolved form.

Recent geological history shows that the oceans have repeatedly absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere during the periodic glacial periods and released it during the warm interglacial periods. This additional capacity for CO2 storage, untapped in the modern, is on the order of 800 GtC, an amount equivalent to that which needs to be sequestered in the coming decades to attain net zero.

In the final talk in the series, Professor Ros Rickaby, Roxana Shafiee and Sophie Gill will explore with Professor Myles Allen the various approaches being proposed to store and preserve CO2 in the ocean, many inspired by mechanisms known to function naturally in the past, and assess the challenges and research hurdles for their implementation in the future.