Exploration Architecture

“How would nature, through the process ofevolution that has optimised life’s forms, systems & processes, solve the challenge of climatechange?”Most people will be familiar with the Vostok ice?core graphs used by Al Gore in ‘An InconvenientTruth’ showing how global temperatures have closely followed the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. For around 400,000 years (and possibly much longer) these variations occurred within a relatively stable band then, over the course of the last 150 years, both CO2 and temperature have departed dramatically from those limits. Some might wonder how, or why, the CO2 levels remained within those bands and by what mechanism the CO2 levels were reduced after each period of rise. One of the most convincing explanations for this involves marine micro?organisms known ascoccolithophores. These remarkable creatures which can exist in their millions in a single cubic meterof seawater grow skeletons from calcium carbonate and, when they die, fall to the ocean floor. When carbon levels rose in the atmosphere (and consequently in the oceans in the form of weak carbonic acid) it resulted in massive blooms of these organisms and, over thousands of years, the skeletalstructures built up as thick layers of limestone on the seabed. Carbon was therefore transferred froma gaseous form in the atmosphere to a solid form in the lithosphere and the climate remained stable.The conclusion that we could draw from this is clear – nature would solve the problem of climate change by making things out of atmospheric carbon dioxide. An excess of a particular resource in nature represents an opportunity and organisms have evolved to make use of what is abundant.In this same way our team are proposing to create a building material made from one of the earths most abundant sources of green house gases, atmospheric carbon dioxide, some of which becomes absorbed by the oceans. Through a process of electrodeposition known as 'BioRock' we intend on sequestering carbon from the oceans and locking it up in a material, similar in property to concrete.The implications of such a product are profound. We could radically reduce the construction industries dependence on concrete and the amount of waste it produces at the same time as decreasing its CO2 output in to the atmosphere.