College of Sciences

A recently published study by the Georgia Institute of Technology reveals that liming, normally used to neutralize the acid in soil, can remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Chris Reinhard, associate professor of biogeochemistry at the School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, said there’s been interest in the carbon cycle for a long time. 

“Some of our research at Georgia Tech and research as collaborators looks at the basics of how the Earth's carbon cycle works in the most general way,” said Reinhard. “But in the last 10 or so years, we've gotten really preoccupied with the impacts of human activity on the carbon cycle. And that spans a whole range of things, because we do all sorts of things to the Earth system as a species.”

The new Atmospheric Science and Chemistry Measurement Network (ASCENT) offers an example of what a stationary network of specialized air quality sensors might look like in the future. The network comprises 12 air-quality-monitoring stations located across the US and maintained by local university scientists. Each station contains a suite of instruments capable of determining the particle size distribution and chemical composition of PM2.5 in real time.

The final ASCENT site began sampling in May 2024, says Nga Lee (Sally) Ng, the lead researcher of the network and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since then, all the sites have been fully operational.

In January, as the Eaton fire burned, its plume blew through an ASCENT site located in southeast Los Angeles. In real time, the local researchers watched the measured concentration of lead-containing PM2.5 jump above safe limits. “Without the speciated chemical measurement, we would not know that [the community was] being exposed to high levels of lead for a short period of time during the fire,” Ng says.

The data from the LA fires are some of the first the ASCENT team has made publicly available, but ultimately all the data will be available for people to view. And when it comes to AQI, Ng sees ASCENT as a possible starting point for expanding PM2.5 standards.