| It was a fun read, I figured a bit of feedback might be of interest. I'm having yet another busy day so I'll just belt out a quick response and hope I don't make too many mistakes or present as overly critical via "just making observations" .. Yep, I'm aware of the PLSS grids and various irregularities caused by incremental expansion - that was one of many parochial land mapping systems across the globe I crawled through in the mid 80s to mid 90s when I was working with ERMapper and related groups tying down older ellipsoids, datums, and projections against the new global WGS84. IIRC the PLSS town plats varied in size (not all are 6x6 mile) and the coverage across the US is incomplete. Guessing that was likely what you meant by township prompted pointing out it was ambiguous and throwing up some real world (for some local to myself subset of that world) farming dimensions. Not farming every square inch is a good approach, it's the one taken here. Onto the freezing of biomass - this is, as I'm sure your aware, more or less peat / tundra permafrost ... and the next worst phase of AGW is anticipated to thawing tundra releasing methane and accelerating the increase in atmospheric insulation. Not to shit on your notion and bury it to capture the carbon, but that is something to think on - how to really really bury carbon for a least a hundred years in the face of AGW and ideally for a thousand or more. Doesn't kill the notion, just raises the bar for implementation - as does the matter of estimating resources required to prep, seed, and harvest large N thousands of hectares and more year in year out for decades. Locally we dig up and ship > billion tonnes of various ores every year which chews through a bit of fuel, energy, and slightly alters the spin of the planet. That's an activity that also has some bearing on the progress of AGW. Given your current writing on geophysical spatial estimation, you might find papers such as Automatic Analysis of Aeromagnetic Images for Gold Exploration * (nope, not one of mine, I do know the authors) et al of interest as they look to tie together geological structure with mineral expressions. * https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1071/ASEG2007ab057 Time permitting I'll circle back, all the best. |
Deep down, I have the gut feeling that in a century's time, people will think we were clinically insane for not trying to stockpile as much carbon as possible in whatever means we have, since it is clearly the foundation for biology, and widespread synthetic biology will use it (and N, and P) by the gigatonne. I really don't see any fundamental physical reason why we won't be growing entire cities made out of wood with the right genetic engineering and sufficient feedstock.