Antarctica is home to the highest concentration of meteorites of Earth, so many that more than 60 percent of meteorite finds originate there. But global warming is endangering Antarctic meteorites, and a new analysis predicts that nearly three-quarters of the continent’s meteorites could disappear of the ice sheet’s surface towards the end of the century, making it almost impossible to detect or recover the precious space rocks.
The research, published in Nature Climate Changeused a machine learning algorithm to project how Antarctic meteorites will fare under simulated weather conditions. Antarctic meteorites accumulated in stranding areas on the continent thousands of years ago and They were embedded in the ice. Today, they are generally found in areas of “blue ice”pockets where the wind reveals older ice that appears blue in contrast to the continent’s vast white expanses.
Meteorites are particularly sensitive to temperaturethe researchers explain, and when exposed to the sun, their darker surface heats up, which can melt the ice beneath and make them they sink away from the ice surface.
The researchers project that in all emissions scenarios, at least 5,000 meteorites a year They will disappear from the surface. Every tenth of a degree increase in temperature correlates with a loss of between 5,100 and 12,200 meteoritesand in a high emissions scenario, 76 percent of the areas currently covered by meteorites will be lost.
This would represent a catastrophic loss for space scientists, who value meteorites for the information they contain about the development of our solar system. Since they formed billions of years ago, space rocks offer important clues about stars, planetary formation, and even the geological history of Earth.
As a result, the researchers say, it is important collect “quickly and decisively” as many specimens as possible before they become inaccessible to science.
“Need accelerate and intensify efforts to recover Antarctic meteorites,” Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist who led the research while working in the civil, environmental and geomatics engineering department at ETH Zurich, said in a press release. “The loss of Antarctic meteorites is very similar to the loss of data that scientists obtain from ice cores collected from disappearing glaciers: once they disappear, they too some of the disappear secrets of the universe”.
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