Greta Stacy is a high school science teacher in Doha, Qatar. She has previously taught in Ecuador and the United States.
This question could be posed to students to spark their interest as part of an introduction to physical science. Students could use their knowledge of the properties of gases and density to discuss this topic as a class. For older students who are interested in how forests act as carbon sinks, this Science Lesson: Carbon Sequestration would be an excellent lesson to use. For younger students, this resource can be used to explore density, giving them a hands-on experience they can use to understand this topic.
Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.
If the carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere were clustered in certain spots, then it might be easier to remove CO2 from the air by building machines that capture CO2 in those places. But this is not the case, says Jesse Kroll, MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering. Kroll says the CO2 emitted by cars, factories, and other sources mixes thoroughly into the atmosphere, so the amount of CO2 in the air is more or less consistent around the world.
“There will be some [variations] depending on how close you are to sources or sinks,” he says. (A sink is a place where CO2 is absorbed out of the atmosphere: for example, over a forest, where trees suck in CO2 to grow.) But those variations are small, Kroll says. There is no place with especially high levels of carbon dioxide to grab. There are more CO2 molecules at the Earth’s surface compared to miles up in the sky, but that is because the atmosphere is densest down low and slowly gets thinner as you get higher.
