The Aria Resort and Casino, within MGM's new City Center complex on the Las Vegas Strip, may be the most technologically advanced hotel ever built. Its mix of gadgets and cutting-edge networks blends centralized convenience with personalized luxury (and even a squeeze of energy-saving sophistication) to offer a glimpse of what all hotels could look like in the future. 

The Aria opened on Dec. 16 last year, marketing itself as a high-tech alternative to Vegas's more traditional resorts, with a data and communication system driven by 283 individual telecom rooms and a broadband antennae network covering 140 million square feet. And while the technology brings many high-tech luxuries to visitors—omnipresent wireless connectivity, 3D monitors and smart touchscreen interfaces—it also crosses into potential Big Brother territory (even by Vegas standards). Here is a close look at some of Aria's biggest technological advances and the issues they raise. 

The Autonomous Smart Room

Aria technicians ran primary and redundant fiberoptic networks to each of the hotel's 4004 guest rooms, allowing for extensive in-room automation. When a guest enters a room, curtains automatically open, music plays, the TV activates and climate controls bring the room to a preset temperature. 

If a guest leaves, the lights go out, curtains close, the TV and music shut off, and the temperature reverts to a preset, personalized setting. All room features (including the "Do Not Disturb" sign) can be manipulated with a Control 4 touchscreen room-automation remote control, or directly through the room's HDTV. A forthcoming iPad app will also allow the tablet to double as a room remote. 

Since guests register with the Aria's data system, the hotel can store all room setting information indefinitely. If a guest returns a year later, their room can be prepped with the same lighting, entertainment and climate settings as during their previous stay. 

Other elite hotels offer such advanced automation, but the Aria is the first to run the service to every room. On one level, it's a gimmick. You can always get up to close the curtains or turn off a light. But, the real advance is still to come—hotel technicians are working on systems that would allows guests to control their room settings from across town through their cellphones. This could result in energy savings by allowing guests to turn off their a/c-saving energy usage as they could turn off their a/c when they leave—and turn it back on before they return to their rooms. 

Augmented Realty

 
Once a guest's smartphone is registered with the Aria, hotel attractions could push personalized notifications to the user. All the guest has to do is hit a button, and the agreement will be akin to a signature. And since the Aria is able to track cellphones while on resort grounds, the hotel will easily be able to send guests special features and offers depending on who they are and where they are standing at any given moment. Are you a known blackjack player? The resort can let you know about empty player chairs at the $25 tables. Like buffets and standing near the dining area? They can send you a digital coupon for $2 off your brunch. 

The House Always Wins

Players will find slots, video poker and the other gambling standards throughout the Aria (after all, this is Vegas). But these aren't just any gambling stations—they have updatable, changeable games controlled and monitored by the Aria's 3000-square-foot data center. The stations, which have hi-def screens that are each run by a Mac Mini, give the house stats on which games are the most popular, allowing the control room to change them accordingly. One-dollar slots not doing well? Change them to a quarter. Video Poker beating out slots? Turn slot machines into poker machines with a keystroke. 

Flexible gambling tech will be essential to other massive Vegas casinos in the future. Gambling is no longer the primary revenue producer in Sin City, with big-budget shows, spas and restaurants now eclipsing the gaming floor. 

Visitors with a limited vacation budget want something for their money—like the memory of a special event or a lavish meal, and not a pile of vanishing quarters at the video-poker machine. When these risk-averse tourists gamble, they tend to weigh their chances and select their games more carefully. So, giving a casino the opportunity to create a more popular gambling machine should allow them to increase revenue. 

Smartphone Key Cards

 
Over the next two years, biometric smartphones will drive further features at the Aria and other tech-forward hotels. "We want to get to the point where we can encode your cellphone so you can use it as your credit card, you room key and your Player's Club card," says John Bollen, CityCenter's vice president of technology. "Guests would open their door or pay for a product or service with a specially developed app." According to Bollen, an Aria app should also work at other MGM properties in Vegas. 

And since every inch of the Aria is covered by what the hotel calls a "heat-sensitive" Wi-Fi network, phones are less likely to find themselves in dead spots. That heat-sensitive technology reads the density of activity on the network, and adds Wi-Fi muscle to parts of the grid that require more bandwidth. 

While using a smartphone as a keycard or credit card certainly sounds appealing, it has obvious security risks, and it could prove difficult for customers to get comfortable with the idea. Hotels like the Aria will have to install multiple levels of encryption and data protection to prevent fraud and privacy violations. 

Watching What You Eat

All dining facilities feature digital menus on the casino floor, at every gaming station and in the restaurants themselves. The Aria's data-hub tracks how many people access the menus, what they access, when they access and what they order. The hotel's food mavens can calculate how many people read the menu compared to how many eat in the restaurant, track what items are selling, and easily adjust menu selections and prices on the fly. 

So far, hotel statistics indicate patrons who scroll through an entire menu tend to move on to something else. Those who stop halfway, though, often get a table. 

In the recent past, it would have taken weeks of record keeping and analysis for chefs and restaurant managers to deduce what their top earners were. Now, the real-time, data-linked menus can immediately read trends from the dinner table and analyze it with a quick and easy cost–benefit table. This could be a problem for guests who enjoy less popular fringe items, which could be pushed off the menu. 

Who's Watching You?

 

The Aria's Honeywell camera surveillance system—and those like it at other hotels—could eventually be used for more than security monitoring. The cameras can use facial recognition software to tell who's coming and going, and to home in on VIPs to whisk them to the front of a line or shower them with special treatment. 

But there are perks to Big Brother watching you—if you're a VIP, that is. For example, if a guest has a Player's Club Card, and his or her face is ID'd (or a smartphone detected), there'll be no need to stand in line at the club. A concierge will scan for the right faces and phones before escorting those chosen people in ahead of the crowd. 

When you combine such cameras with the smartphone network, no one—especially frequent guests—will be able to move around the property with anonymity. And for frequent guests, the hotel might know an uncomfortable amount of personal information—from what they eat, to what TV stations they watch. 

"This house is from the future," observed a fourth-grader as she and fellow classmates toured the Lumenhaus, a net-zero home built by students at Virginia Tech University for the 2009 Solar Decathlon. The home had its first public reception among engineers and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., where it took the bronze in architecture and came in 13th overall in the 20-school contest this October. But some time around midnight on Jan. 27, the trailer-hitched house rolled across the George Washington Bridge and down Seventh Avenue for a 48-hour stint in the middle of Times Square. As the school children toured the 650-square-foot structure, oohing and aahing as cabinetry slid away to reveal a flat-screen television, one child remarked that the house "is perfect for New York City," and another said, "it's perfect for me." 

That seemed to be the general sentiment among passersby. New Yorkers, instantly interrogating designers about how much the house cost, reacted with piqued interest at the locally reasonable $250,000 to $300,000 asking price—a figure that elicited groans in D.C. A Times Square security guard, tempted by the fantasy of buying a nice little spread upstate and plunking this self-sufficient beauty down in the middle of it, pledged to bring his wife and five children back to tour the house before it gave up its stake by the Theater Development Fund's TKTS booth the following night. Another guard, asked if he liked the house, responded, "hell yeah," stating that the house trumped a Ferrari, a Bentley, and even a flying Bentley. "You could have a Bentley with wings, and still, if you said, 'I got a solar house,' that takes it. Nothing beats a solar-powered house." The first security guard added, "It's incredible. Nothing goes to waste." 

He's right. Outside the skyscraper shade of Manhattan, the house's solar panels generate enough juice to power its efficient appliances and its surprisingly homey, diffuse fluorescent lighting. It channels rainwater via a waterfall into a collection tank for irrigation, and its sliding exterior panels can adjust to embrace warm outdoor temperatures or batten down to shelter the home in harsh weather. The sliding panels' exteriors are studded with LEDs, transforming the building into a low-slung lighthouse at nightfall. Daylighting is used throughout, from the skylight over the slick central bathroom to the windows running the length of the long walls. On a chilly afternoon in Times Square, with the intricately fabricated metal screens splayed open, visiting Virginia Tech students and faculty lounged on a living room couch while lights and noise exploded soundlessly beyond the insulated glass. It was, for the day at least, one of the most enviable addresses in the city. Student designer Corey McCalla claimed he'd like to live in this location, "for a while," he said. "I'd at least like to sleep one night here." 

This glowing facade pierced the darkness during its evenings on the National Mall, but the lights of Times Square eclipse the home critiqued by Solar Decathlon rivals in D.C. as "a house that glows in the dark—whoopie." Here in Manhattan, beneath blinking Brobdingnagian underwear advertisements and the luminous latest in American Eagle apparel, the bright house just blended right in. "It's humbling," said McCalla, when contemplating a perch in one of just a few places, Blacksburg excluded, where the Lumenhaus wouldn't light up the night sky. 

It's almost a shame the shack couldn't stick around a bit longer, as sales of replica models through the weekend could surely have funded the next several Solar Decathlons solely on the backs of real-estate-hungry New Yorkers. But it's probably for the best that the house didn't plant roots on 47th Street—this house is due at the international Solar Decathlon in Madrid this June, where it will compete against homes built in China, Finland, Florida and other exotic architectural locales. We hope that students at Virginia Tech took note of New Yorkers' constructive criticism, or at the very least noted one fourth grader's observation in the bedroom: "If this were a water bed, that'd be awesome." There is still time for a few design tweaks before Madrid.

Burj Mubarak al Kabir in Kuwait. (Photograph by Eric Kuhne and Associates)

The Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest tower in the world, officially opened in Dubai on Jan. 4 amid an impressive pyrotechnics display that highlighted the tower's 2716.5-feet of aluminum and steel, and its 26,000 hand-cut glass panels. The Burj Khalifa blows away the next-nearest skyscraper, which is Taiwan's 1670-foot Taipei 101, and the building has even surpassed ultra-tall, ground-cable-supported radio antennas. 

Architects' vertical leapfrogging, however, isn't likely to stop at the Burj Khalifa. While the tower will be a tough one to beat, it is likely to remain at the pinnacle for only about another half-dozen years. Developers around the world have proposed numerous new skyscrapers. Some projects have leapt off the drawing boards, though plans for many record-breaking towers have been scuttled because of the global economic spasms of the past couple years. (The original name of the Burj Khalifa, the Burj Dubai, was changed at the last minute to recognize United Arab Emirates president Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who as emir of Abu Dhabi gave struggling Dubai a $10 billion bailout last month.) 

So what buildings could be the next to rise up and steal the Burj Khalifa's crown? Here are eight future contenders. 



This mammoth structure will rise to exactly 3284 feet, or 1001 meters. The height, in meters, is an allusion to the classic collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, says London-based architect Eric Kuhne, whose firm designed the tower. To break the kilometer-high mark (which is 3281 feet), the $7 billion-plus Mubarak al Kabir will have three interlocked towers that support the overall structure. These towers, or "blades," pinwheel about a triangular central shaft that holds elevators and mechanical equipment. Each blade twists 45 degrees as it rises, for strength, and expands slightly at the top. This Kuwaiti landmark will therefore place more mass and usable space near its zenith compared to other towers, says Kuhne, to avoid the structure having too thin and flexible a tip. To dissipate high-altitude, tower-buffeting gales that could blow at 150 miles per hour, the Mubarak al Kabir will see the first architectural deployment of vertical ailerons—the normally horizontal flaps airline passengers see on a plane's trailing wing edge that help counter wind disturbances. "They will look like continuous ribbons running vertically along the six leading edges of the three blades," Kuhne says. "As [the ailerons] are constantly moving, and catching the sun while they adjust, sunlight will glint off their surfaces. It will add a gentle rippling reflection to the edges of the blades that will add dynamic sparkle to the tower," Kuhne says. The Burj Mubarak has a projected completion date of 2016. 




Building higher also means building wider. That is why the 3280-foot 1 Dubai will be built with three towers. "What tends to happen is as these buildings get taller, the base needs to be wider, but it gets to the point that it's just too wide to be a single building and you start to pull things apart or separate them," says Peter Weismantle, director of supertall building technology at Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture. The smallest tower of 1 Dubai will come in at around 1970 feet and the tallest at about 3280. All three emerge from a tripedal base architects call the saddle. A canal will flow between 1 Dubai's three legs, letting boats sail underneath. Further support for the towers comes from the connecting skybridges where tower residents will be able to congregate. Designers envision building the skybridges at the saddle and then using a jacking mechanism to hoist them into place. Clearing the site for the project began in 2008 but has since been put on hold thanks to the state of the world economy. If and when construction begins in earnest, 1 Dubai will take somewhere between seven and 10 years to complete. 




The 160-story Miapolis will rise nearly 3300 feet on Watson Island in Biscayne Bay, just west of Miami Beach and east of downtown Miami. The $22 billion Miapolis complex will host an indoor amusement park, luxury condos and apartments, office space, a performing arts center, and a marina. With Miapolis, planners hope to demonstrate the potential economic benefits of high-profile real estate: developers say it could bring in nearly a billion in annual tax revenue and pump over twice that into the local economy as visitors flock to South Florida's newest attraction. For now, the project remains on the drawing board at architectural firm Kobi Karp, and there is no shortage of artist's impressions of the many facets of Miapolis. The designers want the complex to be environmentally responsible and intend to have the building receive a LEED Platinum rating by the U.S. Green Buildings Council. Further information about Miapolis is scant for now as developers are tight-lipped about the project, though lead developer Guillermo Socarras says he will be announcing new details in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Socarras is in talks with the Federal Aviation Administration about getting clearance on Miapolis' soaring height, given the proposed site's proximity to Miami International Airport. 




This cylindrical megatower has eight spires that come to a point at the building's peak. Though an official target height has not been revealed, the Nakheel Tower is likely to crest 3280 feet. Its designers, the international firm Woods Bagot, aim for the Nakheel Tower to be the first true realization of a vertical city. Over 15,000 people will live, work and socialize in this spire with a ground footprint the size of a New York City square block. The placement of support columns is based on a radially symmetrical 16-point star pattern and is inspired by Arabic patternmaking. The pattern makes engineering sense because a symmetrical building bears the load evenly among its structural units, according to a 2009 case study on the Nakheel Tower published in the journal of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. The trickiest part about designing the Nakheel Tower, according to the study, was dealing with so-called vortex shedding from winds, which can cause damaging vibrations. Instead of funneling wind around its metal and glass skin, the Nakheel Tower takes the uncommon approach of having large gaps in the midst of the building, with a double set of slots that let gales pass right through. Every 25 floors or so, big disk-like skybridges bind the towers together and serve as village squares for high-rise dwellers, as in 1 Dubai. Also as in 1 Dubai, the Nakheel Tower's completion date has been held up because of unfavorable market conditions, though some early construction work did get underway before the stall. A completion date has not been announced and the project may never resume. 




The Takenake Corporation proposed Sky City 1000 back in 1989 to tackle Tokyo population-density problems. Tokyo-like congestion prompts a demand for green space and office space that vastly exceeds supply, and also introduces a host of environmental and social issues, from pollution to uncomfortably packed commuter trains. Takenake's solution: Build up—way up—and place green spaces in the sky. "The feature of our proposal was making artificial land in the air," says Masato Ujigawa, manager of the engineering department at Takenaka. To achieve this, Takenake will first start with a base that is 1300 feet per side, a footprint that equates to several city blocks (Burj Khalifa's triangular footprint is just 300 feet or so). Then, in accordance with its name, Sky City 1000 will rise a full thousand meters (3281 feet), consisting of 14 levels stacked on top of one another. Each level will act as its own "town," with a park-like plaza area in its center ringed by residences, schools and businesses. The structure would hold 10,000 homes and be used in some capacity by 130,000 people. Construction has not begun on Sky City 1000 since Japan's population has begun shrinking as of 2005, Ujigawa says. Nevertheless, Ujigawa says that ideas originally espoused by the Sky City 1000 project have since been used in more conventional construction. These include concrete reinforced with carbon fibers instead of iron to cut down on weight, and self-contained water-service systems in buildings that treat sewage and reclaim water. 




The roughly $15 billion Bionic Tower will break from traditional engineering principles, introducing radical design elements for the 4029-foot-tall tower, according to Eloy Celaya, an architect with ECE Arquitecturas and one of three principal Spanish designers of the Bionic Tower. Instead of vertical foundations, Celaya envisions a "floating foundation" similar to a tree's roots, with a tangle of many hundreds of anchors in the ground. For supportive, criscrossing trusses, the Bionic Tower will draw inspiration from bird bones, which are light and hollow. The twelve stacked neighborhoods within this vertical megalopolis will receive water, energy and other supplies by means of 92 vertical columns (much like the xylem and phloem transport systems in vascular plants), which will double as structural supports. Though the concept for the Bionic Tower was originally pitched to Shanghai, China about a decade ago, at present the prospects for this tower being erected someday are iffy. 




This skyscraper was initially billed as the Mile-High Tower in 2008, though the record-setting height ambitions have since been cut by nearly 2000 feet. Updated design plans have not yet been revealed for the Kingdom Tower, but the winner of a design contest between Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture should be announced in a few weeks. Marshall Gerometta, of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the group that certifies supertall building heights, says that the Kingdom Tower probably is the best bet in the near term to overtake the Burj Khalifa. Funding appears secured for this building, which will be the centerpiece of a new $27 billion planned urban area in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, overseen and financed by the Kingdom Holding Company. The first mile-high setup called for the creation of two stabilizing mini-towers to support the main tower. The mini-towers, at nearly 1000 feet each, about the height of the Eiffel Tower, will be dwarfed by the central spire. Many supertall building tops have an "expected" lateral movement of 10 feet or so, and to mitigate this swaying effect, a massive, computer-controlled object called a damper will be placed within the mile-high structure. What the eventual building will look like and how it will be engineered remain open questions, though Gerometta says he heard the Kingdom Tower was going to represent "a new generation of skyscrapers." 




This concept tower has also been referred to as the Al Jaber Tower in accordance with its possible placement in Kuwait. This tower would soar to a full nautical mile, 1852 meters, or over 6000 feet. Italian architect Omero Marchetti, the founder of the Millennium Challenge 1852 project, says "to reach [a marine mile] you cannot use concrete, orthogonal grids, traditional systems, mortars, [and] cranes." The building would dispense with right angles and perpendicular planes as these structural engineering norms make large quantities of cast iron and concrete "follow an unnatural and twisted geometry," Marchetti says. He has instead looked to the hexagonal matrices of snowflakes, which as structurally supported objects combine high volume with low weight. Marchetti says that currently three groups of investors in different parts of the world are interested in making the Millennium Challenge Tower a reality, a step he believes is necessary to make a sustainable planet. "I think we have not a second chance, or if you prefer, we have not a second planet," Marchetti says. "I tell you that this is the future, which is up to us to capture now." 

Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, is steering company funds to Intellectual Ventures, a private company that buys and licenses patents and inventions. Gates himself participates in the firm's brainstorm sessions. Next on the list: killing hurricanes. Warm surface water fuels big storms, so Intellectual Ventures proposes to suppress them by dumping cool water from massive floating bowls of unspecified size, deployed by airplane in front of a storm's path. It would take a water surface temperature drop of 4.5 F to diminish a hurricane's force, says Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, and hundreds of bowls would have to be deployed over hundreds of miles. "I actually don't think it's feasible," says George Mellor, a Princeton professor who envisioned a similar system years ago. "But it's worth researching, and, hey, if Bill Gates is investing ..." 

INTELLECTUAL VENTURES
Employees: 500-plus Funding: $5 billion in venture capital from investors (including Microsoft)Revenues: Company officials told a newspaper earlier this year it has made more than $1 billion in licensing fees since inception. 

Other Ideas from Gates's Idea Factory

Mosquito Laser Defense Researchers at a recently opened Intellectual Ventures lab in Bellevue, Wash., are building the ultimate bug zapper. The "photonic fence" combats malaria by surrounding houses or villages with a perimeter guarded by lasers that shoot mosquitoes from the air. The computer-guided laser can track the flight of individual mosquitoes, and distinguish harmless males from biting females by measuring the frequency of their wing beat. Crucially, the laser beam is weak enough that humans can pass through the perimeter unharmed. The system has been successfully tested in the firm's labs. 

Super-Strength Semiconductors Intellectual Ventures recently purchased the entire patent portfolio of Transmeta, a trailblazing manufacturer of low-power microprocessors. Transmeta was purchased in 2009, but the company that bought it was only interested in microprocessors for video displays, and sold 140 other patents to Intellectual Ventures. The technologies could lead to powerful, efficient computer chips to use in expendable remote sensors, medical devices inside human bodies and nano-scale manufacturing. 

In an 1889 travel article, the New York Times waxed enthusiastic about a nearby but, it said, little visited attraction: "the wondrous Palisades…. basaltic precipices of the Hudson." Rising on the west side of the lower Hudson River for 20 miles in New Jersey and New York, the towering Palisades are actually the visible remnants of enormous floods of magma that flowed hot about 200 million years ago, cooling into a vast expanse of basalt that extends to Europe, Africa and South America, much of it buried deep under the Atlantic Ocean. 

Early Dutch New Yorkers called the staircase-like basalt of the Palisades "trap rock"; not because it trapped anything, but after their native word for "step". But a new scientific analysis suggests that the related basalt formations buried under the U.S. east coast and extending out to sea might someday be doing some critical trapping after all—of greenhouse gas emissions from the likes of giant coal-burning power plants. 

The analysis, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that expanses of basalts along and just beyond the heavily populated east coast might be ideal for locking-up billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). 

Advocates of "clean coal" technology see carbon sequestration—capturing and then storing CO2 deep underground—as a way for the world to keep burning the cheap and abundant fossil fuel without aggravating global warming. Whether carbon capture and storage will ever turn out to be economically or environmentally feasible remains open to often-fierce debate. But the prospect of injecting CO2 into basalt formations could at least resolve one major fear: that the gas might eventually escape to the surface. 

The Ultimate Repository

Basalt, it turns out, is capable of performing what seems like sheer alchemy: It can transform normally buoyant CO2 dissolved in water into something decidedly non-buoyant—solid rock. Essentially, a series of chemical reactions combines carbon dioxide with calcium in the basalt to form calcium carbonate, or limestone. 

Dennis Kent, a professor of geological sciences at Rutgers University, and one of three co-authors of the study, says that transformation from gas to solid could make basalt formations "the ultimate repository" for excess carbon. 

Although the report notes that some basalt formations on land might suffice as storage sites, the deeper formations under sea beds could be particularly attractive when it comes to preventing CO2 from escaping, according to study co-author David Goldberg, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. 

Hundreds or even thousands of feet of sediment can lie atop undersea basalt formations. In addition to a thick cap of solid basalt that would lie above any suitable deeper injection site, those thick blankets of sediment could serve as an additional impermeable cap during the years the CO2 was becoming mineral. (Research has yet to fully detail just how long it would take for a volume of CO2 to transform into rock.) 

The new study points to an array of expansive east coast basalt formations, including four undersea of more than 380 square miles each off New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, as well as large formations on land and under the seas in and around Georgia and South Carolina. 

Globally, potential for carbon storage in formations of basalt and other "ultramafic" rocks (those with minerals that react with carbon dioxide to form more minerals) could be enormous. Goldberg and Columbia scientist Angela Slagle have estimated that basalt formations under oceans worldwide alone have the potential to store tens of trillions of tons of CO2. 

According to the analysis, a single formation buried under the coastline near Sandy Hook, N.J., just south of the city of New York, could store 900 million tons of CO2, or 40 years of emissions from three to four large coal-burning power plants, although the report also notes that a great deal of research, including drilling to map and characterize formations, still lies ahead. 

Elsewhere in Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East, research on whether basalt and similar formations can indeed offer a safer pathway to carbon storage is accelerating. 

Real-World Testbeds

Until recently, the only real-world attempts to study basalt injection have been small experiments in test wells in the Pallisades rock by Columbia geochemist Juerg Matter and fellow scientists. But beginning in February, Matter and a team of researchers from France and Iceland plan to kick off a larger-scale pilot project at a geothermal power plant owned by Reykjavik Energy. (In this case, the CO2 isn't a by-product of combustion, but comes up from underground as traces of geothermal gas in the huge volumes of steam that provide most of Iceland's heat and electric power.) 

Over about nine months, the "CarbFix" project will inject about 2000 tons of CO2 into a 2000 foot hole bored into an island that itself is more than 90 percent basalt. According to Matter, the researchers will use additional holes drilled a few hundred yard away to monitor changes in groundwater, which should show how effectively and quickly chemical reactions are occurring. 

Meanwhile, in the United States, environmental engineer B.P. "Pete" McGrail, at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, reports that his team has completed drilling and prep work for another experimental project to inject about 1000 tons of CO2 into a basalt formation under the southeastern corner of the state of Washington. McGrail is waiting for permits to be finalized, but noted in an email, "If our permit is approved, CO2 injection would occur sometime this summer." 

McGrail says he concurs with the new report's suggestion that undersea basalt formations could someday become major repositories for carbon, but suggested that "those opportunities would develop later down the road after pilot and commercial studies show feasibility in terrestrial settings." 

Basalt isn't the only rock that reacts with carbon dioxide. As PM reported in 2008, Columbia's Peter Kelemen continues to investigate the potential for a type of rock called peridotite, not only to lock-up carbon captured from the likes of power plant emissions, but even to yank volumes of the greenhouse gas directly out of the atmosphere, with some help from water and heat from the earth's interior. 

Notably, about half the nation of Oman lies atop formations of this rock. If it turns out to work, what Kelemen calls "air capture" could effectively help neutralize, as he told us, the "substantial portion of CO2 that comes from places where we wouldn't have any hope of capturing it—CO2 emitted by cars, for example."