In an average year, the basin absorbs about 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Forests serve as carbon "sinks" by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it.
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Microscopic algae, the earliest living organisms, drew carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and expelled oxygen.
The wind caller takes cues from chimney smoke, flags or undulations from the atmosphere.
These will absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then conveniently sink when they die.
Curbing climate change means both removing carbon from the atmosphere and oceans and avoiding new carbon emissions.
They could also be engineered to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
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As well as playing an important role in food chains, phytoplankton also absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This destruction of ecosystems which remove carbon from the atmosphere can lead to a net increase in emissions.
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The oceans take up 40 percent of all carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so they are pretty significant.
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The resulting photosynthetic activity could, in theory, increase the storage of carbon from the atmosphere into the deep ocean.
Most of their oxidant, in the form of oxygen, comes from the atmosphere.
Until recently, the costs of removing carbon from the atmosphere on that scale have been regarded by economists as prohibitive.
Various entrepreneurial researchers are looking at ways of extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stashing it out of harm's way.
He believes he has developed a system to capture CO2 from the atmosphere at low heat and potentially at low cost.
There are only two ways to genuinely solve the problem: by drastically reducing emissions or by removing the CO2 from the atmosphere.
It also has a lower tendency to absorb water from the atmosphere.
Cloud seeding is a technology that facilitates rainfall by extracting the maximum amount of moisture from the atmosphere, condensing it around chemical pellets.
The newly discovered microbial carbon pump could provide a novel way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, should that ever be deemed necessary to combat climate change.
Through afforestation, reforestation and cutting down agricultural emissions, by one estimate, carbon dioxide equivalent to 40 parts per million could be extracted from the atmosphere by 2050.
The other approach is less risky, and involves removing carbon directly from the atmosphere and burying it in vast ocean storage beds or deep inside the earth.
Woody biomass has been presumed to be carbon neutral because carbon emissions released by burning the wood would be taken back up from the atmosphere as new trees grew.
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If they have gained mass it could be because the platinum based ingots have absorbed mercury from the atmosphere or hydrogen from the solvents used to clean the ingots.
Fossil fuel burning and fertiliser manufacture now take more nitrogen from the atmosphere than all of the planet's nitrogen-fixing microbes - and there are a lot of those bugs out there.
And it's believed that the high chemical reactivity of the surface is due to the deposition of chemically active gases from the atmosphere onto the surface, gases like hydrogen peroxide and ozone.
Critics of existing scrubber technology however point out that the technology only removes the toxic chemicals from the atmosphere at the expense of depositing them in the ocean as contaminated waste water.
Cherenkov telescopes such as the Hess array in Namibia or the Magic facility in the Canary Islands catch this process directly from the atmosphere when the particles first arrive at Earth.
But it is the idea of using biochar to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a semi-permanent basis that has caused people outside the field of agriculture to take notice of the stuff.
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The company uses patented technology to manufacture atmospheric water generators which, in certain geographic climates, can take humidity from the atmosphere and convert it into as much as 1200 liters of clean, potable water per day.
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The removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, either through the enhancement of natural weathering processes or direct capture from ambient air are further examples, as well as the enhancement of oceanic CO2 uptake through ocean fertilisation with scarce nutrients or the enhancement of upwelling processes.
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