Climate change is already causing all sorts of problems on Earth, but soon it will be making a mess in orbit around the planet, too, a new study finds. MIT researchers calculate that, as global warming caused by the burning of coal, oil, and gas continues, it may reduce the available space for satellites in low Earth orbit by anywhere from one-third to 82% by the end of the century, depending on how much carbon pollution is spewed, per the AP. That's because space will become more littered with debris as climate change lessens nature's way of cleaning it up.
Part of the greenhouse effect that warms the air near Earth's surface also cools the upper parts of the atmosphere where space starts and satellites zip around in low orbit. That cooling also makes the upper atmosphere less dense, which reduces the drag on the millions of pieces of human-made debris and satellites—drag that pulls space junk down to Earth, burning up on the way. In other words, a cooler and less-dense upper atmosphere means less space cleaning itself, which in turn means that space will get more crowded, per a study published Monday in Nature Sustainability.
Circling Earth are millions of pieces of debris about one-ninth of an inch and larger—the width of two stacked pennies—and those collide with the energy of a bullet. There are tens of thousands of plum-size pieces of space junk that hit with the power of a crashing bus, per the Aerospace Corporation, which monitors orbital debris. That junk includes results of old space crashes and parts of rockets, most of it too small to be tracked. Meanwhile, density at 250 miles above Earth is decreasing by about 2% a decade, a rate likely to intensify as society pumps more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, said the British Antarctic Survey's Ingrid Cnossen, a space weather scientist who wasn't part of the research.
story continues below
Cnossen said that the new study makes "perfect sense" and is why scientists have to be aware of climate change's orbital effects, "so that appropriate measures can be taken to ensure its long-term sustainability." "We rely on the atmosphere to clean up our debris. There's no other way to remove debris," said study lead author Will Parker, an astrodynamics researcher at MIT. "It's trash. It's garbage. And there are millions of pieces of it." More here.
(More
climate change stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
