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Scientists Plan "Artificial Volcano" Climate Experiment
First time accepted submitter tonyt3 writes "Scientists plan on conducting an unusual climate experiment at a Norfolk airfield next month. They plan to spray water into the air about 20 km high to mimic volcanic particles, hoping that their findings could lead to a solution to global warming. From the article: 'Pouring 10 million tonnes of material into the stratosphere each using 10 to 20 giant balloons could achieve a 2C global drop in temperature, the scientists believe. Sulphate emissions from the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in June 1991 reduced world temperature by 0.5C for two years.'"
The air's pretty thin 1000 km up -- considering that the Space Station orbits at less than half that. Maybe 10 km?
-- Alastair
... please pick up the red courtesy phone when you manage to free one of your arms from the straightjacket.
My understanding was water vapor was more potent than co2 at trapping heat. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas)
...this totally blows away my papier-mache-and-baking-soda model.
I bet those guys are going to win the Science Fair.
Sometimes you're on a crowded bus and you can tell that the person next to you decided they didn't have time to actually get clean, but thought they could mask their odor with deoderant. Unfortunately, in some cases, what you get is a retch-inducing mixture of BO and deodeo.
Solutions like this to the climate issue remind me of those folks on the bus. If there's a real problem and if there are real things we can do to address the cause, let's do them. If, instead, we don't address the cause but do something else to mask the issue, then it seems likely that we'll just end up with an even bigger mess. I can just imagine scientists from another planet examining the burnt out husk of Earth and saying, "There's no life there; the atmosphere is an unlivable mix of carbon dioxide and sulphates!"
The CB App. What's your 20?
I'd much rather save the earth by spending and using less than dumping even more crap into the air. Quick fix anyone?
I'm glad scientists are working on ideas like this. The reality is that we, the human race, are not going to stop burning fossil fuels. We'd best get on with figuring out how to deal with the resulting problems rather than continue dreaming that everyone is going to agree to stop.
It's like a smoker using air filters to clean up second hand smoke. Sure it may reduce the consequences of their actions, but it doesn't negate the fact that the addiction is the source of their problem.
That being said, I don't want to dismiss their research altogether. The data will probably be useful for improving climate models and we may just have to resort to such tactics since we've been doing relatively little about climate change even though we've been aware of the issue for decades.
The summary is off by three orders of magnitude - after all, there is no air in 1000km to keep the water suspended.
Obviously, then, the water will fall down on the atmosphere. And give the ISS a pretty ice glaze.
Or we will get a ring of ice around Earth - just like Saturn.
That can probably also solve the problem, but it may actually cause the problem of an ice age instead if something goes wrong.
"What can possibly go wrong?"
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
for empathic people of all bents, or just those that interfere with your own ignorant, self-serving actions?
you should pull your head out of your ass and actually read something. Not from your friends at fox, however, they've obviously damaged your brain enough.
Hydrogen still works perfectly fine as a lifting gas. Doubly so when you're doing crazy last resort geoengineering.
What those idiots don't seem to realize, is that the effects of volcanic eruptions and the associated decline of global temperatures has always had catastrophic consequences. Be it the year without summer 1816 because of the Mt. Tambora eruption, the famines of 536 or the the Hatepe Eruption of 180AD.
Balloons should detonate up there and spray calcium hydroxide particles everywhere. My idea my patent.
The long-term vision is to tether 20 kilometre-long pipes to balloons the size of Wembley stadium.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Pouring 10 million tonnes of material 1 km in the sky is going to require a fuckload of energy.
I know, "but they're using balloons!"
Balloons aren't free lift. You have to fill them with something, and you have to produce that something from something else.
Helium? Limited supply. If you think Carbon footprint is a big problem, you ain't seen Helium footprint yet.
The solution to greenhouse gas is to STOP PRODUCING THE STUFF.
Just use hydrogen. If they burn up, big deal, they just produce more water. These aren't being used to move people, and (presumably) it won't be done over a populated area.
And presumably you get your CaOH by heating limestone.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
This is just a first test of the technology. If they were really going to use this for climate engineering, they'd use "clay, salts or metallic oxides suspended in liquid" (according to TFA) to reflect some sunlight back into space before it hits the earth.
As you can imagine, just figuring out whether you can pump millions of kilograms of stuff 1,000 meters into the air (not 1,000 km, as the submitter wrote) is an open question. Their ultimate goal is to get it 20 km up. For the first test, you use what's cheap: water.
The water itself is a greenhouse gas, but water molecules condense and fall as rain. It quickly returns to the existing equilibrium. The goal is to put up particles that would stay there for a while. Unlike water, they don't condense and fall out as quickly.
Before it fell, the water would reduce sunlight a bit. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but water in clouds isn't vapor; it's condensed droplets. Those droplets can reflect light; that's why cloudy days are dark. The goal isn't to produce water clouds, which would only be temporary and would be too much darkening. The goal is to put up enough particulates to get a slight reduction of incident light without having to continually pump new particles into the atmosphere.
(Note: I'm not crazy about geoengineering as a solution to climate change, but the experiment is still interesting.)
The answer; a lot of coal would be needed to run this program
The uncomfortable truth; relatively little coal would be needed to run this program.
The world consumed 4.74*10^20 joules of energy in 2008, it is safe to say that at least half that was carbon based.
the simple equation m*g*h say that operating at 100% efficiency, the pumps would need 1.96*10^15 joules per year to pump 10 million tonnes of material 20 km high.
Now say the pumps were only 10% efficient, and assume my 50% carbon based energy claim is true, then a tax of 0.01 % (yes; one hundredth of one percent) on all carbon based energies would fully fund the program's energy needs with a little surplus. Assume the infrastructure/administration also costs something then a tax of 0.02% would probably take care of the whole dang thing.
Compare a 0.02% tax with the exponentially higher taxes guaranteed in a cap and trade scenario.
Potable water is way too precious a resource to be feasible for such an 'experimental' (read: crack-pot) idea:
FTFA:
''We're going to try to pump tap water to a height of one kilometre through a pipe as a test of the technology.'' ...
Pouring 10 million tonnes of material into the stratosphere each using 10 to 20 giant balloons could achieve a 2C global drop in temperature, the scientists believe.
also:
Experts believe particles of clay, salts or metallic oxides suspended in liquid would prove more effective than the sulphates produced by real volcanoes.
So, why aren't they starting with salt water, again? If their experiment achieves everything they ever hoped for, they're still going to have to do it all over again with sea water anyways...and see if the resulting salt-water rains affect anything (gee, you think it would?) Or they're going to have to start building some big-ass desalination plants...and I just bet they won't be solar-powered, either....
(FWIW, '10 million tonnes' of water = 10 million cubic meters = 10 billion litres of fresh water...)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
PS: mod parent up.
I may disagree with him, but the guy has a good point (if only he had some karma)
Argh, blargh. I really hate it when people are so sure about completely wrong science, especially as their aggressive misinformation is being exploited by civilizational sociopaths.
I am usually nice on the internet, but this will be an exception.
Slashdot posters usually have some knowledge of Newtonian mechanics 101 and will rightly laugh at those who don't believe in say, conservation of momentum.
Well, this is the same level of blunder, so here goes the explanation, as nice as I can make it without wanting to strangle internet ignoramuses.
Yes, water is a greenhouse gas, and yes every climate scientist since 1900 or whatever has known this, and there has never been any conspiracy to "suppress" this, especially given that the water cycle is at the core of every weather and climate model and observational data set.
And human "emissions" of water are completely and totally irrelevant (say like the post above) because the planet is in statistical equilibrium with those very large sources of water known as "oceans". Water, namely vapor and clouds, are *feedbacks* with timescales of two weeks, vs dozens to thousands of years for carbon dioxide. For example, if you magically took all the water out of the atmosphere, how long would it take to get back to normal? A few weeks. If you magically saturated the atmosphere completely with water, how long would it take to get back to normal? A few weeks. If you magically took all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, how long would it take to get back to normal? Many, many millions of years.
The amount of water in the atmosphere is determined in large measure, by,what---yes the temperature! Hotter air absorbs more water, and yes, the water vapor will add its own greenhouse effect. The water vapor amplifies global warming which was induced by the excess of long-lived greenhouse gases like CO2 (and others) introduced by human activity. (Clouds are less certain---they may go both ways for heating/cooling in various cases, this is a complex area of current study---but the base level effect of vapor {clear, humid air} is undisputed and significant)
The scientists who have been studying this for decades know what they're talking about.
Yes. The animals and birds and glaciers don't respond to human biases, and what they're doing is clear indication of warming.
The denialists are getting worse---they started out saying "there's no warming" (after the 1990's volcano had some temporary cooling), and then when the warming got clear, they said "well we don't know that people are responsible" (after all it could be magic fairys who just happen to change infrared emissivity of the atmosphere in exactly the way predicted by liberal-infected chemistry professors say that greenhouse gases do, when of course they don't, because in the atmosphere they're special and closer to heaven and don't have the same vibrational modes that they do in the lab). And now they're going back to denying that there's warming at all?
Couldn't we achieve the same effect, if all 5 billion+ of us on the planet go outside and blow a raspberry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_a_raspberry ? Ya know, like, spraying water particles in the air? It would certainly be a lot of fun if we had a World Bronx Cheer Day.
. . . augmented by World Spit-Take Day . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Except the idea is not to lift tons of stuff, but a pipe that pumps the stuff up and sprays it. The balloon only needs to lift the pipe and the fluid in the pipe at any time, not the total of the fluid pumped up over the course of the project.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Exactly.
We're already seeing the fallout of this ideology in the form of mandatory burning of food in Europe and the USA as biofuels. Not to mention that this debate is hiding the fact that the developing countries are catching up to our economies while the production of energy resources cannot be expanded indefinitely. In other words: The industrialized countries will have to share those resources with the developing countries, which is something they are perfectly unwilling to admit to the public. And now they are trying to pull out any argument they can find to limit the use of those resources, without having to admit that this is what they are doing. The problem with that is the distortion of science through politics pushing scientific inquiry away from "politically sensitive" studies (those studying negative feedback mechanisms of climate) into ones that are more compatible with prevailing notions (those studying positive feedbacks).
If you are not looking for negative feedback mechanisms - or don't fund research on negative feedback mechanisms - guess what, all you'll find are positive feedback mechanisms that will inevitable support your preconceived conclusion that the positive feedback far outweighs the negative. And this is much worse than ignorance - it is selective ignorance.
should we really be messing with mechanics we can't even pretend to understand yet? This sounds like an idea that could have catastrophic consequences.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
The only plan I see here is one to sequester millions of pounds of tax-payer's money into yet another unbelievably stupid mitigation scheme.
It was the equivalent of putting a drop or two of oil in an olympic-size pool. In the long run it was insignificant.
Any scientist who is a proponent of AGW theory is pure as the driven snow, honest, no ulterior motives, and with no allegience to those writing the paychecks. His goal is purely the science.
Any scientist who is a skeptic of AGW theory is an evil troll, dishonest, greedy, wants to destroy the Earth with his SUV and other wasteful habits, and will produce any result those who are funding him dictate.
At least that's how it appears the true believers see it, the ones who have lost the ability to be skeptical.
Presumably a balloon would not even need to be detonated - it could be made to explode from the pressure changes in the atmosphere as it ascends - although it may not release its particles at a desirable altitude in that model. Then there is the release of whatever gas was used (helium) in the balloon, although I don't know what effect that would have on the atmosphere.
Just go to an environmentally sensitive area in a suit and good hair, point to the ground, and say to the TV cameras, "We need that calcium hydroxide."
Bad idea, bad, bad idea
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
"And taking a look at the long range forecast, continued snow, darkness, and extreme cold. This is Howard Handupme, saying goodnight... and goodbye."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Except then you'd introduce the additional variable of a worldwide shortage of clean pants.
Then make more. Nothing's stopping you from making more helium. All you need to do is squash a couple of hydrogen nuclei together and you have helium.
The only reason why we 'struggle' for water, at least in some places is because no one wants to build desal plants. This really holds true in places like California. Well whatever, the leftist state full of nimbyists that it is.
Om, nomnomnom...
Don't they end up mining Haley's Comet to get ice cubes? After all, it is the only source of bug free ice cubes.
Why use an artificial volcano. Just wake up one of the slumbering super volcanoes and be done with it...
Don't worry, they won't be using neither expensive helium, nor dangerous hydrogen. They'll use the good old safe heated CO2, which they'll get by burning propane.
You're right, helium is too precious to be used for more than the initial tests. Once they get into unmanned platforms far out to sea, there is really no reason not to use hydrogen. It should be possible to arrange it so that if there is an fire nearly everything but the envelope itself can be salvaged.
The amount of lift needed will less than 100,000 tonnes. A 50cm diameter x 20km column of water weighs less than 4000mt. The pipe will have to have some serious walls, though - that's nearly 2000 bar just from hydrostatic pressure, and much more will be needed to push the water -the article states 4000bar. Allowing 50% extra length for the curve and figuring the weight including the hose wall as equivalent to a 64cm diameter column of water, that is about 10000 tonnes. The envelope will have to be huge, though, and it will weigh much more, about 72 tonnes if I've done my math right. (Figuring 1250m length, fineness 2.8 ellipsoid, 50g/m^2 envelope (higher weight envelope figured to allow for airbeam skeleton/keel), net lift of 0.8N/m^3 for H2 at 20km standard atmosphere.) A bit more lift is needed for reserve lift, other equipment and the higher density of salt water, but the total should be in the neighborhood of 100,000 tonnes.
That size pipe at that pressure should deliver about 3 or 4 cubic meters per second if the water is going at 15-20m/s (~35-45mph). At the higher flow rate, that would be about 785MW just to lift the water, and over 1.6GW including pipe friction. That's about 1/8 km^3 per year and about 5e16 Joules/year.
The water will need to be atomized - Prof. Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh designed an elegant, efficient and reliable way of atomizing such large volumes of water in his paper "SPRAY TURBINES TO INCREASE RAIN BY ENHANCED EVAPORATION FROM THE SEA". (The rain-making part didn't work, as the spray suppressed natural ocean eveporation by increasing humidity.) The atomization should not take a relatively significant amount of power, less than 1MW.
It may be possible to offset the energy cost by using wind power. The wind will do work on the charged water spray, which will be carried a long way, turning into microscopic salt-crusted condensation nuclei before being rained out, mostly into the ocean, which could act as a current return path. The work of the wind would be turned into a higher voltage on the droplets by capacitive voltage multiplication (costant charge on the droplets, increasing distance from the spray electrode -> lower capacitance, higher voltage). A direct wind-electric energy conversion should be possible, though how much power it would produce is an open question.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Then you obviously haven't looked very hard...
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
The period after the Dark Ages was the height of productivity in Western Civilization in terms of arable land and agriculture. It was warmer then! If we actually mess with things and cool them down then we are trusting people who's models are vague and imprecise and shown to be filled with errors in the past. If Global arming is as some suspect the approaching of the tipping point for an ice age, do we really want some scientists to push us past the inflection point into a wild ride down the other side. It would eventually solve the Detroit blight problem, but at the expense of all of Canada. If as they have noted a single volcano can have orders of magnitude greater effect than all of humanity under normal circumstances, then why for raving flying pasta would they try to exert a greater influence in a field wrought with contention when the possible outcome is "really really bad"(TM).
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
I see that the you've upset the denialist fairies. I'm sure they'll come to their senses one day, probably instants before the Rapture.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
We're struggling for water in California because there's 15-25 million people (depending on who you ask) living in a fucking desert. Los Angeles just had flash floods. The land is covered with asphalt so the water has to be channeled into viaducts and then sent directly out to sea. Normally water is stored in the land but when it's a bunch of sand if you let it into the ground you're going to liquefy your city. So while more water than Los Angeles needs falls on the city every year, we still have to send nearly all the water they use from Northern California so that they get it at a usable rate.
California's water problems are due basically to three factors. One, deforestation. This creates numerous problems with retention of water. Two, simply unsustainable growth. Los Angeles is utterly unsustainable as it has been built. In theory if every building sat atop a catchment you could retain most of what you need, but the cost of actually doing that would be beyond astronomical. Also, if we do wind up getting any significant sea level rise, Los Angeles will have to be renamed Blub Blubblubblub anyway. Three, abuse for profit. This takes two primary forms. One, agricultural water rights are based on usage. Stop using it, and the water is taken away. So people maintain their water rights either by simply wasting water, or illicitly loading water into trucks and selling it. Two, lots of water is now being bought by private companies (notably Nestle, under the Calistoga brand) and bottled, and people are actually being taken off of springs their homes have been connected to literally for generations, and being put on city water — usually poorly treated and in any case full of chlorine and chloramines that serve a useful purpose but which are undesirable in the water the customer actually uses.
California is not in water trouble because of nimbyism, but because of simple greed and capitalist economics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't know that they're back to denying warming entirely. What you may be seeing is that the moron poster above is a hold-out from the first camp of people saying "there's no warming". It's not like they all move in lock-step.
Pipe friction losses will more than double the energy needed. OTOH it should be able to offset a bit of that with wind. Solar would only offer a percent or two of the energy needed, even if it covered the whole upper surface of the balloon, and the weight and expense would make it impractical.
Harnessing the wind could potentially be better, given the high and relatively constant winds in the stratosphere. Because of the nearly 20x lower density, though, the ~15m/s (34mph) median stratospheric wind speed's average energy content per area is about equivalent to an 14mph (6.25m/s) breeze at sea level. (~88W/m^2 Betz limit).
With the vast quantities of electrostatically charged droplets produced by the sprayers and the huge size of the droplet plume, a direct conversion of wind energy to electricity with an enormous effective wind capture area should be possible. The wind will pull the charged droplets away from the oppositely charged sprayer, doing work and increasing the voltage between them. The droplets will eventually settle out onto the oppositely charged ocean, completing the circuit. A load such as a pump can be hooked between the ocean potential and the sprayer potential. (An insulating layer between the ocean potential and the sprayer potential is needed, which can in principle be achieved by having the pump body be nonconductive, isolating the two sides of the circuit in the same way a revolving door prevents a free flow of air. The actual system would be in multiple stages, as it would have to withstand megavolts to keep the currents in the tether manageable while transmitting many hundreds of megawatts.)
With plumes over a km thick and several km wide, (dozens of km^2) the system could potentially power itself, or even produce a surplus.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
possibly go wrong?
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
How would you feel now if the scientists of the 1970s started a campaign to inject large amounts of CFCs to "fix" the global cooling problem? History has consistently shown us that messing with our environment ends in bitter failure. We can't even create a self-sustaining garden if our lives depended on it (see Biosphere II)
Scientists regularly see theories in different ways, our understanding changes, and we adapt. Maybe the science behind this is has some basis. Unfortunately, we jump straight to the solution and start testing hacks to our atmosphere to "fix" a problem that we've barely understood.
Is the fusion technology that's always 20 years away what you're talking about?
Sounds to me like we are getting a head start on blotting out the sun to stop those pesky solar powered robots from wiping us out. They will never find a power source as abundant as the sun. What could go wrong?
Ground level ozone is also hard on plants and other living things.
Spend a little time on WattsUpWithThat and you might change your mind about their hive mind.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Umm, nothing can go wrong if you intentionally try to reduce the amount of energy that reaches the surface. Nothing at all.
Just Don't Do It !
I still haven't seen any overwhelming evidence that global warming is real.
Now with free added "anthropogenic":
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/scale:100/plot/esrl-co2/offset:-300/from:1980/plot/wti/scale:100/trend
I still haven't seen any overwhelming evidence that global warming is real. Just a lot of hot air from talking heads and religious pseudo-science "true-believers".
Any actual proof that isn't bought-and-paid-for or biased by one side of the debate or the other?
That's exactly the problem. The climate is a huge complex system with a lot of inertia. The point where the "evidence is overwhelming" is probably way beyond the point where we'll be able to do anything about it within a reasonable time-frame. The best time to plug a leak is when it's just drip-drip-dripping, not when you're drowning.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
ancestor poster said that sunlight is limiting in rainforests. Perhaps under the top canopy, but I'm skeptical about it being limiting at the top of the rain forest.
In my bio class, many years ago, so the guestimates may have changed, the prof said that few plants increase photosythesis at all above insolation levels of about 25%. Of course in a Rain Forest it's frequently heavily cloudy. Perhaps on cloudy days, light is limiting. Hmm.
For most plants CO2 is limiting. Commercial greenhouses will run CO2 up to levels of 10000 ppm (1%)
Temperature is often limiting too. Lots of plants basically shut down at temps above 90 F, by closing their stomata to reduce water loss. Sure, in a rain forest there is lots of water, but you have to pump that water from the roots to the leaves. Water loss is highly non-linear with temp, so at some point you can't generate enough energy to replace the water.
Reducing the amount of sunlight is unlikely to reduce photosynthesis directly, unless it forms a lot of dense cloud.
***
One Discover channel doc pointed out that the amount of aerosols produced by China and India has masked the warming substantially. And with increasing prosperity, these countries are cleaning up their air. It is likely that we are going to see a rebound effect with much faster global warming for a year or so.
***
Ancenstral poster commented about melting ice caps reducing the temperature difference the drives the winds. Possibly, but not by much. The equator still gets a lot more radiation per square meter than the polar regions. They are also a lot larger. Melted north polar ice cap reveals a lot of water, which with low angles of incidence is still a pretty good reflector. However vapour pressure of water/air is large compared to ice/air. This may result in warmer, wetter sub-arctic regions. The circumpolar tundra's climate may become more like Sweden's with much heavier snowfall. (Much of the tundra is cold desert -- less than 10 inches annual precipitation)
Back to wind: The equator receives about 1.4 times as much radiation as does latitude 45. If mass transport didn't haul the heat away, it would have to radiate. To radiate 1.4 times as much heat it would have to increase in temp by a factor of the 4th root of 1.4, or about 1.09. Increasing the absolute temp by 9% works out to about 26 C temp rise.
Obviously this model is very flawed. I've ignored a bunch of things. Long before the temp rises that much you will get convection cells. They just run at a higher temp.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Well, when someone implies that climate scientists don't know how to account for water vapor (which guess what, they do) ... and blah blah blah ...
I mean, like, dude, talking about taking someone's comment (originally part of a sarcastic comment with a bit of truth followed by a very funny comment) completely out of context. Here, the following will help remove the sand and soap-boxed centipedes out of your irritated, self-righteous whining/indignant private areas:
take this as needed.
If the goal is to put particles into the air at high altitude, why not dump carbon black into the discharge of airline engines?
Hey, if you really wanted a permanent solution, maybe you could even come up with an inert fuel additive which had the property of being unburnable at turbine temperatures, and doesn't deposit on the turbine blades. It would have to be relatively cheap too. A miracle compound? Sure. But it beats pumping brazillions of gallons 20km into the air.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Sorry about the double (and now triple) comment. I thought the first had got lost.
Just because you think you are special does not mean that your ramblings automatically have any legitimacy.
If you don't require net energy production, it works now.
:) That's true. It would probably be more cost effective to mine it from one of Jupiter's moons though.
Aww. Someone feeling butthurt about the reality of 'natural earth events' causing cooling of the earth? Boo fucking hoo. Remember mod-trolls. -1 flamebait != disagree.
Om, nomnomnom...
At (say) 20km height and 100atmospheres per km (of water), the implied pumping technologies are a step forward, but not a major one. 20,000psi (1300 atmospheres) pumping in considerable volumes is an off-the-shelf technology. Another factor of a dozen is likely to be no major deal, given that simultaneous improvement in balloon-supported platforms are implicit in the package.
What interested me more in the story was that balloon-mounted Metropolitan-Area-Networks is one of the communications technologies touted for improving local connectivities without needing to lay lots and lots of new fibre. A balloon technology that can adequately support multiple tons of machinery for months or years is ... well, a balloon technology that can support multiple tons of machinery for months or years. Which will have other uses.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"