Lapis philosophorum? Image of limestone, Missouri Department of Natural Resources: https://dnr.mo.gov/

Iceland: scientists pumped CO2 and water under the craggy ground of this island beloved by Vikings. Why Iceland? Same reason Romans made such good roads — volcanic rock. The experiment bet on the hunch that CO2 + Water + Minerals = Building Materials.  “Of 220 tones of injected CO2, 95% was converted to limestone in less than two years,”  reported Southampton University’s Juerg Matter. Iceland’s Hellisheidi geothermal power plant near Reykjavik helped to tag the CO2 used with carbon-14, leaving a radioactive trace as a check when testing to see if any escaped to the surface or leaked into nearby water sources: not a trace was found. Study co-author Martin Shute of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, comments it is possible to find “basalts on every continent.” From Harry Potter to Jabir ibn Hayyan, 8th century alchemist, and Albertus Magnus who wrote of the lapis philosophorum, the means of turning base metals to gold has long been a quest. Are we now witnessing an energy miracle of transmutation?

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License