Why not just sow the soil with salt?
“Why not just sow the soil with salt?”
No ground up basalt rock is not salt it’s primarily, iron,magnesium,and calcium silicates it’s not NaCl or any other of the chlorides. Basalt is known as a basic rock because its overall PH in slightly basic.
CO2 plus rain = carbonic acid which when it comes in contact with fine ground basalt dissolves the silicate bond and forms metal ion bicarbonates of Fe,Mg Ca as the main ones plus smaller amounts of K, Na, Al all in +HCO3 bicarbonate form K, Mg and Fe are plant nutrients this would actually fertilize the soils. There are places that use rock powder already as a fertilizer. One only has to look at how green and fertile the soils are in Hawaii where it gets rainfall to see how well basalt weather’s to fertile soil components.
This would actually help turn non arable land into fertile soils some organic carbon is needed to kick off the formation of humus this could be biochar from the pyrolysis of waste biomass such as corn stalks or sugar cane stalk or sawdust anything that grew can be heated in a sealed container and reduced to active carbon biochar. The rich black soils that are 1000s of years old were made by man who burnt trees in great piles where the centers of those piles were turned to biochar then spread out over the now clear field it drastically increases fertility and the effect last thousands of years that much is crystal clear. Carbon dating is spot on for active carbon C14 is only formed via cosmic rays in the biosphere until humans mastered nuclear fission and we can now create it with nuclear graphite in RBMK type reactors or AGR types.
This simply accelerates the natural process of hard rock weathering while improving soil quality, so no real harm can come from it. All the carbon man put up eventually was coming down into the oceans as bicarb over geological time anyways, via hard rock weathering and direct ocean surface absorption into the ocean water bicarbonate system all of it will eventually precipitate out or be bioccumulated as shells ,reefs, or limestone. Don’t get all worked up it’s not a planet dooming qtard conspiracy it will take 500+ years to pull down what human have put up in excess of what natural is part of the carbon cycle. It’s not how much rock you can grind is how much wet land do you have to spread it over and even ground to micron sized particles the kinetics of 440ppm to rain to bicarbonate is not all that fast. Sleep easy the warm embrace of the anthropocene will cradle our species for at least a century.