Save earth as a geophysist

This is a motivation letter I wrote in September 2021, when I was going to attend a CO2 challenge. However, the last minute I found there has to be more than half undergraduate students among group members. So I leave it here.

In recent years, rare and even unprecedented extreme weather has arisen more frequently and wildly over the whole world.

Summer gets hotter. This July, extreme heat reaches an unprecedented high temperature up to 54.4 Celsius, scorching western Canada and the USA. The storm gathers unexpectedly. On the land of Eurasia, a rainstorm hits India and takes away 135 people pitilessly. More severe floods happen in Henan, China, and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Even winter becomes abnormal where winter storm causes power crisis in Texas, challenging centuries of the human industrial civilizations.

These oncoming events reveal that it is more than just global warming. It is about the change of the balanced climate of the Earth from poles to the equator, from the summer to the winter. As described in the movie the day after tomorrow, the melting ice sheet weakens the formation of deep water in the northern North Atlantic, reducing the transport of warm water from south to north. The effect of heat salt circulation slows, breaking the global heat balance, cooling the climate in Europe and eastern North America, and ultimately accelerating the Earth into the next ice age.

Scientists have studied for years how climate change is formed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that human activities produce overwhelming greenhouse gas, resulting in the rise of the temperature, the rise of the sea level, and now the catastrophic impact of global climate. Among all the greenhouse gases, the emission of CO2 takes the most significant proportion and is the culprit of climate change. When tracing back to the sources of the CO2 emission, it is not hard to spot the burning of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the fifth assessment report in 2014 did not evoke enough attention. Compared to the so-called climate change, which most people unknown and unconvinced, people intended to maintain the progressive production, especially in the less developed countries and regions, because the restriction on fossil fuel energy means to deprive their subsistence and the hope for prosperity right the moment. Besides, the new clean energies were just emerging to very limited industrial applications. In recent years, we have gradually seen the development of electric cars as a powerful replacement for petrol vehicles. “If it’s not renewable, it’s going to run out at some point,” Elon Musk says. Though only reducing the usage of fossil fuels becomes far not enough to protect our Earth anymore. The sixth assessment report from IPCC emphasizes that only reaching the net-zero goal by 2050 could maintain the rise of global temperature in a relatively safe range of 2 Celsius in 2100. The net-zero requires CO2 to be captured, sequestrated, and, more economically, utilized by the industries.

When it comes to Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS), plenty of efforts can be contributed by the society of geoscientists and engineers. Injection of CO2 to the deep saline aquifer is the safest approach to storage CO2 permanently. Several decades of oil exploration practice solidly on injecting CO2 deep inside the Earth, accumulating the knowledge and experience on the examination of the subsurface medium. These include but are not limited to finding the saline aquifer and the caprock, modeling the reservoir, monitoring the injection, monitoring and detecting the migration or leakage of the CO2.

Specific to our team, we are an integrated multidisciplinary group with geophysicists, experts of high-performance computing (HPC), experts of artificial intelligence (AI), and amateur of meteorology. We have passion and would like to contribute our efforts to the health of our planet as much as possible. Members in geophysical background learn better about the subsurface condition, HPC and AI help to accelerate the conventional method to reduce the cost of CCUS, and a wider knowledge of earth system science provide us a more comprehensive understanding of the issues. We are ready and looking forward to exploring the bright possibilities our young people could make.