As far as I understand, you are proposing to reduce the amount of H₂CO₃ from the water by removing CO₂ from the water and leaving H₂O. Yeah, so why can we not just take the CO₂ out of the water? This is a very good, and important question.

Let me tell you that there are ways to take CO₂ out of the water but maybe you allow me to ask a question back to you: If you could take the CO₂ out of the ocean, where would you put it? There is so much of it, that you cannot just put it into a container and put it somewhere into your garage. You will have to do something BIG. So, there are several options:

Put the CO₂ into the atmosphere: You could think about putting the CO₂ into the atmosphere but there are two problems.

• First, you may have learned that we have too much CO₂ in the atmosphere. Because of this CO₂, the earth is getting warmer. Therefore, ice on the north pole and south pole is melting, there are more big storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires. So, we do not want to have more CO₂ in the atmosphere.

• Second, the CO₂ in the atmosphere and the CO₂ in the ocean are in a “balance”. That means that if you take CO₂ from the ocean and put it into the atmosphere, the CO₂ will just go back into the ocean. So, you will have to put it somewhere else.

Put CO₂ underneath the earth - into the rock: People are working on taking CO₂ from the atmosphere and putting it deep underneath the earth into rocks. This will bring CO₂ out of the atmosphere and then out of the ocean (because atmosphere and ocean are in a balance). This is a good option but it is not enough.

Use the CO₂ in the ocean to make rocks: Have you ever seen a rock that is called “limestone”? There are a lot of limestone rocks on the earth and this rock has several minerals in them that contain CO₂. For example calcite: (CaCO₃). If you can make more limestone in the ocean, you can take CO₂ out of the ocean and people are thinking about how to do this. For example, if you can put more Calcium (Ca) into the ocean, that will cause the calcium to take CO₂ from the ocean and make CaCO₃ (limestone). This is something that people are thinking about. But then, the next question is, where does the Calcium come from? Maybe you can find it out?

The problem with all these techniques is that the ocean and the atmosphere are so complicated that you don’t always know what will happen if you mess with it. What happens if you put more calcium into the ocean? Will this be a problem for the fish and other live in there? The best option will always be to make less CO₂. For example, use cars that make less CO₂ and use energy from the sun and from wind instead of coal and oil.

Keep thinking about this! The CO₂ in atmosphere and ocean is one of the biggest problems that we (including you!) will have to solve in the next 100 years!

H₂CO₃ constantly changes back into CO₂ and H₂O, just as CO₂ and H₂O constantly change back into H₂CO₃. This is called an equilibrium. By removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, we could thus remove H₂CO₃ from the oceans, because the oceans would replenish the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, getting CO₂ out of the atmosphere is no easy task. It took millions of years to form all of those fossil fuels that we have been burning, and it will take millions of years more for the oceans to restock them.

H₂CO₃ can also be removed through carbonate precipitation: the minerals calcite and aragonite (both CaCO₃) can get the carbon out of seawater, but doing so requires calcium to use them up, and that calcium has to come from somewhere. Even so, this takes hundreds of thousands of years. Technological means of carbon sequestration (removing CO₂ from the atmosphere) are being worked on, but they're not ready yet.

The 'good' news is that a lot of the ocean acidification comes from CO₂ in the air, so everything we are doing to reduce CO₂ also helps the ocean.

Also, marine life will adapt somewhat to more acidic oceans - we don't know how much they will adapt yet. Here's an encouraging statement from a good scientific article: "an emerging body of evidence suggests that the impact of rising CO₂ on marine biota will be more varied than previously thought, with both ecological winners and losers."

Here's the link to the article: Doney 2009

The other thing this article says is that we need to reduce atmospheric CO₂ to reduce ocean acidification - we can't just cool the earth by putting particles in the atmosphere, for example.

That's all I'm finding - ocean CO₂ [i.e., H₂CO₃] comes from atmospheric CO₂, so we need to keep working on reducing atmospheric CO₂ levels.

I think your idea is in good direction and shows that you are concerned about the environment. I have two points that I want to share with you. The first and most important is that the H₂CO₃ formed in the ocean or water is meta-stable. Basically it is a dynamic process and H₂CO₃ will decompose into H₂O and CO₂ at the same time. So if there is less amount of CO₂ in the air, then there would be less H₂CO₃ formed.

The second point is that our ocean is dominating our planet, it would cost a lot if we do what you suggested. So in short, if we release less amount of CO₂ into the air, the Ocean Acidification problem would be solved automatically.