Tech

The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns


This contraction means that the upper atmosphere is becoming less dense, thereby reducing drag on low-orbit satellites and other objects—about a third by 2070, calculate Ingrid Cnossen, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey.

In this respect, this is good news for satellite operators. Their payload will work longer before falling back to Earth. But the problem is that other objects share these elevations. The growing amount of space junk—pieces of equipment of various types left behind in orbit—also lingers longer, increasing the risk of collisions with currently active satellites.

More than 5,000 active and defunct satellites, including the International Space Station, are in orbit at these altitudes, accompanied by more than 30,000 known debris more than 4 inches in diameter. Cnossen says the risk of a collision gets bigger and bigger as the cooling and shrinking process accelerates.

This may not be good for business at space agencies, but how will changes overhead affect our world below?

A major concern is the already fragile state of the lower stratospheric ozone layer, which protects us from harmful solar radiation that causes skin cancer. For much of the 20th century, the ozone layer thinned under attack from industrial emissions of ozone-eating chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The ozone hole completely forms every spring in Antarctica.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol aims to close annual gaps by eliminating those emissions. But now it is clear that another factor is sabotaging this effort: the cooling of the stratosphere.

Ozone destruction is overactive in polar stratospheric clouds, which form only at very low temperatures, especially in the polar regions in winter. But a cooler stratosphere means there is more opportunity for such clouds to form. While the ozone layer over Antarctica is slowly reforming as the CFCs disappear, the Arctic is proving different, says Peter von der Gathen of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany. In the Arctic, cooling is exacerbating ozone loss. Von der Gathen says the reason for this difference is unclear.

In the spring of 2020, the Arctic had its first ozone hole with more than half of the ozone layer lost in many places, which von der Gathen blamed on an increase in CO2 concentration. It can be the first of many. In a recent time paper IN natural communication, he warned that continued cooling means that current expectations that the ozone layer will be completely healed by mid-century are almost certainly too optimistic. On current trends, he said, “conditions favorable for the large seasonal loss of the ozone column in the Arctic could persist or even worsen until the end of this century…much longer… than the usual prediction.”

This is more of a concern because, while the areas below the Antarctic holes were previously largely uninhabited, the areas below the Arctic ozone holes in the future. potentially one of the more densely populated regions on the planet, including Central and Western Europe. If we think that the thinning of the ozone layer is the worry of the 20th century, we may have to think again.

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