The race to 'save' thousands of meteorite fragments from climate change

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 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 disappearing rapidly 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 by 2050, about a quarter of the asteroid fragments will be gone. 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 0°C, 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 ice surface temperature 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 meteorite collection in Antarctica before it is lost to climate change. Similar to collecting ice cores from disappearing glaciers or sampling coral reefs before they bleach, our study identifies meteorite loss as an unintended impact of climate change that we need to address," said Harry Zekollari, a VUB expert and co-author of the study.

Thu Thao (According to SciTechDaily )

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