Week 0

Hello everyone, welcome to my blog! My name is Lyra Yum-McGaughey and I am a senior at BASIS Independent Brooklyn. For my senior project, I will be focusing on the sustainability efforts Iceland has taken, and how they could be applied in the US.

Due to the increasingly worsening conditions of the earth, it is crucial to bring attention to climate change and how we can fight it. Researchers and Icelandic climate change scientists have been consistently studying and developing different techniques and technologies to battle the effects of climate change. The United States however, taking into consideration that it is one of the most powerful countries in the world, still has lots of room for improvement. Iceland has created many plans of action, the most recent version updated in 2020, called the Climate Action Plan (Government of Iceland, 2020). This design consists of a list of 48 actions to cut carbon emissions and achieve carbon neutrality (Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, 2020). In the practice of mitigating climate change, Iceland has been working on developing Direct Air Capture (DAC) technologies in order to reduce carbon footprint. DAC is a simple filtration process that helps reduce atmospheric CO2 by trapping and filtering air while allowing other components, like nitrogen, oxygen, humidity, ash, salt, dust, etc., to pass through. This method can either make use of the CO2 elsewhere, such as carbonated drinks, or can use the carbon sequestration method to send the carbon deep underground where it will solidify and turn to rock. Furthermore, Iceland’s unique landscape (stemming from its formation atop a transform fault) allows it to extract 70% of its energy source from its glacial rivers via hydraulic power units, and the rest from geothermal energy–because of its abundance of volcanoes (Government of Iceland, 2020). Through interviews, extensive research, and working with field professionals, this project will look at the geological and governmental differences between Iceland and the US, and consider the possibility of applying the effective strategies currently implemented in Iceland, to the United States to help mitigate all the effects of climate change. I have also attached my senior project proposal here if you are interested in learning more!