Global warming is accelerating the sinking of meteorites into the Antarctic ice, destroying valuable research material.
Antarctica is an ideal place to hunt for meteorites. Photo: José Jorquera/University of Santiago, Chile
Antarctica has a large concentration of meteorites on its surface. Therefore, this icy continent contains a lot of invaluable information about the Solar System, allowing people to learn about the emergence of life on Earth, the formation of the Moon and many other issues.
However, meteorites are rapidly disappearing due to global warming, according to a new study by a team of scientists from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) Birmensdorf and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), SciTechDaily reported on April 12. This disappearance will greatly affect human knowledge of extraterrestrial life.
There are currently at least 300,000 meteorites on the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet. Due to warming, about 5,000 are disappearing each year, five times faster than the rate at which they are being collected.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to combine satellite observations of Antarctica with climate model predictions, the team of scientists estimated that about a quarter of the asteroids will be gone by 2050. That number could rise to three-quarters by the end of the century, depending on future greenhouse gas emissions.
"Even when the ice temperature is below zero degrees Celsius, dark meteorites warm up a lot in the sun and can melt the ice directly below. In this process, the warm meteorite creates a local dent in the ice and over time it disappears completely below the surface. As the atmospheric temperature increases, the surface temperature of the ice also increases, thus accelerating this process because less heat from the meteorite is needed to melt the local ice," explained Veronica Tollenaar, a scientist at ULB and co-author of the study.
"To protect this invaluable extraterrestrial material, we need to increase the collection of meteorites in Antarctica before they are lost to climate change. Similar to collecting ice cores from disappearing glaciers or sampling coral reefs before they bleach, our study identifies the loss of meteorites as an unintended effect of climate change that we need to address," said Harry Zekollari, an expert at VUB and co-author of the study.
Thu Thao (According to SciTechDaily )
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