Picture Source: BBC Science Focus
With the world in acclimate crisis due to decades and decades of pollution, the earth is fighting back. Hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, droughts and the ever-rising global temperatures are wrecking the earth’s surface. Among the chaos, in the land of blizzard-whipped glaciers and volcanoes, Iceland becomes the first to harbor the world’s largest plant to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum.
“Mammoth” in Hellisheidi, Iceland, is the most recent industrial-scale plant to suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it underground. Swiss company Climeworks started up this plant on a Wednesday in May 2024, claiming that it can remove an impressive 36,000 metric tons of C02 every year. It’s predecessor, Orca was the first ever plant to exist of its kind, much smaller than Mammoth, launched in September 2021 by the same company.
Picture Source: BBC Science Focus
Many experts believe that in addition to quickly reducing the use of fossil fuels, the world must find techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere as the earth continues to warm, which will have disastrous effects on both humanity and the environment. Katherine Calvin, NASA's chief scientist and senior climate adviser says “If you want to stop temperature from rising, you either need to stop carbon dioxide from going into the system or scoop out as much as you put in."
So how does this effort to save the climate work? To put it simply, this technique removes CO2 from the air using blocks of fans and filters. Following its capture, the CO2 is combined with water and pumped underground, where it undergoes a chemical reaction to form rock.
Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh states that this plant is “an important step in the fight against climate change”. Many have their reservations about carbon removal, however this might just be what the world needs to get on track to a better climate.
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