The Norwegian Sea could be a safe dumping ground for carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas blamed for global warming, Norway's Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center said. The center has proposed a research project where liquid CO2 would be pumped directly from offshore oil and gas fields to the deep waters of the Norwegian Sea to see if it could be stored there safely. The project will ascertain whether CO2 pumped 800 m down into the Norwegian Sea will dissolve and spread to the Atlantic Ocean before eventually being neutralized by ocean bed sediments. "The oceans already absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but this can take up to a thousand years," Helge Drange, research leader at the center, said.