The Earth’s oceans are saturated with 30-40% of the greenhouse gas produced by human activities—and MIT has discovered a new way to remove those. As reported in an article by David L. Chandler published in the MIT News this week, a team of MIT researchers say they may have found the key to an efficient and inexpensive removal mechanism.
This method could be used in locations around the globe—desalination plants, fish farms, and even on ships—and it “could slowly start to reverse, at least locally, the acidification of the oceans that has been caused by carbon dioxide buildup, which in turn has threatened coral reefs and shellfish,” according to MIT Mechanical Engineering Professor Varanasi. Read more here.
You can read their findings here in Energy and Environmental Science, a journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Credit to the authors: MIT professors T. Alan Hatton and Kripa Varanasi, postdoc Seoni Kim, and graduate students Michael Nitzsche, Simon Rufer, and Jack Lake.