Cooling the Earth by altering the PH of our oceans

As the climate changes and the Earth warms to alarming levels, humankind needs to find a way of capturing and storing our carbon emissions or CO2.

The world’s oceans have historically absorbed half of man-made CO2 emissions, which has resulted in an altered PH and warming of the seawater.

So much CO2 has been absorbed, in fact, that our oceans are overloaded and their capacity to absorb more CO2 is in decline.

There are different ways to add alkalinity to the ocean, according to the Ocean Visions website, including distributing dust-like alkaline substances over the open ocean, and spreading alkaline sand around coasts.

Photo: screenshot from a Climate Works youtube video.

A more complex strategy would be to combine seawater with alkaline minerals inside reactors before returning the alkaline enhanced seawater back into the ocean.

Photo: screenshot from a Climate Works youtube video.

While research has been going on for the past five years, recent months have seen a couple of companies putting the technology into practice along the coasts of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

A firm called Planetary removed 138 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere at the end of 2024 while Ebb Carbon has committed to getting rid of 350,000 metric tons of carbon over 10 years, The Washington Post reports.

But in order for the technology to become a significant part of the climate solution, it would need to remove billions of metric tons of carbon per year, Matthew Eisaman, an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences at Yale, told The Post.

Millions of dollars are currently being poured into ocean alkalinity enhancement research in a bid to find the best way to apply the technology on an extensive scale.

While experts agree that the strategy has potential, one of the biggest challenges is measuring how much carbon it can actually capture from the atmosphere and store.

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