Soot pollution is accelerating climate-driven melting in Antarctica, a new study suggests, raising questions about how to protect the delicate continent from the increasing number of humans who want to visit.
The number of tourists visiting each year has ballooned from fewer than 10,000 in the early 1990s to nearly 75,000 people during the austral summer season that began in 2019, according to the“It really makes us question, is our presence really needed?” says Alia Khan, a glaciologist at Western Washington University and one of the authors of the new study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications.
The dark particles coat white snow and soak up heat from the sun the way a black T-shirt does on a warm day. “These are the mirrors on our planet,” says Sonia Nagorski, a scientist at the University of Alaska Southeast who was not involved in the new study. Soot is also a huge problem at the other pole. Black carbon pollution has plagued Arctic communities for decades. Oil and gas operations in Alaska, Canada and Arctic Russia and Europe release enormous amounts of pollution compared to tourists and researchers.. And massive climate-driven wildfires spread soot across huge swaths of the Arctic each summer.
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