The Royal Academy on Piccadilly has always cosied up to scientists. The famed art gallery cohabits Burlington House with the Linnean Society, the Geological Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry. The latter scientific institution put on its own art show earlier this year, with a series of chemically inspired sculptures in the forecourt. Now it’s the turn of the art gallery to get all chemical.

During the next two months, the front of the Royal Academy will be dominated by this 8-metre diameter sculpture of a zeolite. These aluminosilicate minerals are sometimes called ‘molecular sieves’ because their highly porous structure allows sequestration of small molecules. Now, if there is one small molecule we’d all like to see bound up and gagged, it’s carbon dioxide. The new artwork, made from recyclable carbon fibre, is based on a zeolite carbon scrub that might help limit emissions of that greenhouse gas.

But it’s not just a pretty embossment to the building. The art work, known (rather painfully) as CO2morrow, is liberally speckled with nearly 1500 LEDs. These will illuminate to show fluctuating levels of atmospheric CO2, as monitored by the School of Environmental Sciences, East Anglia.

The sculpture was created by artists Marcos Lutyens and Alessandro Marianantoni as an architectural frontispiece to the gallery’s GSK Contemporary Earth: Art of a Changing World event, which runs from 3 December to 31 January. After this time, the artwork will be displayed at various National Trust properties across the country.