BGU is Leading a Global Climate Change Revolution
BGU is Leading a Global Climate Change Revolution
March 12, 2025
Natural Sciences, Sustainability & Climate Change
Dr. Avner Gross, Senior Lecturer, BGU Department of Environmental, Geoinformatics and Urban Planning Sciences
The Times of Israel – Curbing global warming and climate change requires innovative solutions. One promising approach involves emerging technologies for the capture, adsorption, and storage of carbon by changing its state of aggregation. These technologies aim to enhance natural sequestration through accelerated weathering of minerals, including a “magic mineral dust” that stimulates seaweed growth, enabling it to absorb carbon and sink to the ocean floor, where organic carbon is transformed into rock and stored for thousands of years.
Tiny particles that look like dust may be the key to humanity’s struggle against global warming and climate change. At Ben Gurion University of the Negev’s (BGU) lab, Dr. Avner Gross and his team are working on a development called “magic dust” – a mixture of natural particles with a dual role: to provide critical nutritional elements required for growing seaweed such as iron and phosphorous, while also acting as a “submarine” that delivers the seaweed to the ocean floor and which will, in practice, absorb carbon for thousands of years. In other words, they are engaging in developing technologies for the capture of CO2.
In the war against climate change, carbon capture is a vital and critical process for reducing the negative influences of increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere. “The research in the lab attempts to imitate nature, while searching for ways to accelerate different processes and adapt them to the Israeli climate,” Dr. Gross explains. The goal is ambitious: “To capture huge quantities of carbon dioxide – ten billion tons a year – in order to curb global warming.”
Dr. Gross has established a forum for carbon capture that incorporates about 300 researchers from all the country’s research institutes and will open its ranks in the future to the private, business, and public sectors. The forum constitutes an excellent example of the way in which Israel is utilizing its relative advantages – a combination of advanced academic research, technological entrepreneurship, and state support – to contend with global challenges.
Read more on The Times of Israel>>
Stories Like This
