One of the biggest contributors to man-made climate change is the sheer quantity of carbon that we’ve released into our atmosphere.

Though you might think that this merely affects the world above us, our oceans aren’t immune, with high levels of greenhouse gases also filtering into our seas.

This causes the normal biological processes that have happened under our oceans throughout time to break down, since they are facing lower pH levels than ever before.

Known as ocean acidification, the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere makes the ocean more acidic, which in turn threatens marine ecosystems as we know them. Not only can some corals and shellfish find themselves unable to maintain their shells, other animal behavior and feeding habits are impacted.

If allowed to continue, ocean acidification is liable to trigger one of several ocean tipping points which could plunge our planet into climate disaster.

With this dire warning in mind, many of the world’s scientific minds are focused on de-acidifying the oceans before it is too late.

Over in the UK, the island nation’s government have funded a ground-breaking carbon capture start-up to fight climate change by literally sucking the carbon out of the ocean.

Known as SeaCURE, the carbon capture project is aimed to run alongside an overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions – not to permit them to continue in some kind of balance, but to clean up the mess we’ve already made.

Based in the South of England, SeaCURE sucks seawater out of the English Channel and filters it – oddly enough, by making it more acidic at first, to allow the carbon stored in the water to be released as gas – as Plymouth Marine Laboratory’s Professor Tom Bell explained in an interview with the BBC:

“When you open a fizzy drink it froths, that’s the CO2 coming out. What we’re doing by spreading the seawater on a large surface area. It’s a bit like pouring a drink on the floor and allowing the CO2 to come out of the seawater really quickly.”

But the CO2 isn’t just haphazardly released into the atmosphere. Instead, it is sucked away and stored.

Meanwhile, the seawater is then neutralized through the addition of alkali, so that it can be pumped back out to see in its ideal state.

Of course, the seawater will almost immediately re-absorb CO2 and become acidified again – so what is the point?

Well, as SeaCURE’s Dr Paul Halloran told the BBC, this is the point. By sucking as much carbon out of the seawater as they can, SeaCURE are allowing the sea to absorb more carbon from our atmosphere. In an ideal world, this will then be sucked out once more, until we reach a much happier state, but to do so is challenging:

“Seawater has got loads of carbon in it compared to the air, about 150 times more. But it has got different challenges, the energy requirements to generate the products that we require to do this from seawater are huge.”

Though SeaCURE currently only have the capacity to remove around 100 metric tonnes of CO2 per year, it’s important to note that the project is in its early stages. The team believe that if the project were to be scaled up across the world, filtering just 1% of the world’s seawater would remove 14 billion tonnes of CO2 from our atmosphere and oceans every year.

And as we seek out a world that is safer and healthier for generations to come, any small impact we can make is worthwhile.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about why we should be worried about the leak in the bottom of the ocean.