Scientists Activate Facility to Suck Carbon Directly Out of the Ocean

To combat climate change, a team of scientists are sucking CO2 out of the ocean. The project, dubbed SeaCURE, began operating a small-scale trial this year on England's south coast, the BBC reports. It hangs its hopes on a simple premise: that the ocean is the world's largest carbon sink, absorbing nearly a third of all CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. A flurry of projects have explored capturing carbon directly from the atmosphere. SeaCURE explores an alternative route. Instead of capturing carbon from the air, it proposes removing it from the ocean, freeing up the deep blue to absorb even more of the CO2 that civilization is pumping out. "Seawater has got loads of carbon in it compared to the air, about 150 times more," Paul Halloran, a professor in ocean and climate science at the University of Exeter who leads the SeaCURE project, told the BBC. "But it has got different challenges, the energy requirements to generate the products that we require to do this from seawater are huge ... Read full article.