Asteroid Impact and Volcanic Winter Countermeasures
Investigating whether stratospheric delivery capability could provide technological responses to catastrophic atmospheric events that currently have none.
Some atmospheric catastrophes are not choices. Asteroid impacts have profoundly affected our planet. A Tambora-scale eruption could produce multi-year crop failure across the Northern Hemisphere. A Toba-scale event could be far worse. Large Igneous Province (LIP) eruptions have been associated with several of the major mass extinctions.
Currently, humanity does not have a technological response for any of these. Society's plan, to the extent it has one, is to endure them.
CCI's catastrophic event response program investigates whether a general-purpose stratospheric delivery platform, the same engineering developed under the Skypipe program, could open countermeasure options. Potential approaches include delivering material to promote agglomeration and accelerate sedimentation of volcanic or asteroid impact aerosols, and injecting material to protect the ozone layer or alter stratospheric reflectivity.
These applications occupy fundamentally different political ground from anthropogenic SRM. There is no distributional conflict in counteracting a volcanic winter: no nation benefits from one. There is no moral hazard: no one is choosing to have a volcano erupt. There is no mitigation deterrence: responding to a Tambora event does not reduce the incentive to cut emissions. The governance questions are real, who decides to intervene, at what threshold, with what international coordination, but they are the governance questions of disaster response, where established frameworks exist, rather than the governance questions of climate policy, where they largely do not.
CCI believes that developing delivery capability under the disaster-response rationale, where governance precedents are stronger and political opposition is lower, can also build the monitoring infrastructure and institutional capacity that would be needed if anthropogenic SRM is ever seriously considered.
- Whether specific materials could promote agglomeration and sedimentation of volcanic or asteroid impact aerosols
- Whether specific materials can protect the ozone layer during an atmospheric catastrophe
- What delivery rates and timelines would be required for meaningful effect
- What monitoring and detection infrastructure would be needed to characterize a catastrophic event rapidly enough for intervention to be useful
- How disaster-response governance frameworks apply to stratospheric intervention