The corridor of winds from the south that has generated during the last days the anticyclone located to the east and the storms to the west has not only allowed temperatures to be high, but has also channeled haze or desert dust towards the Canary Islands and the Peninsula.
In the Canary Islands they have already had it but the haze seems to take center stage tomorrow in points of the peninsula
If you see the cloudy sky it is due to the high concentration of suspended dust … pic.twitter.com/qhZ6czyq6z– Target Storm (@objtormentas) February 17, 2021
Recently, the scientific community has discovered an incredible connection between the largest hot desert on the planet, the Shara, and the largest forest mass on Earth, the Amazon. The dust clouds that come out from Africa are capable of crossing the Atlantic and travel loaded with elements such as phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, calcium and iron, which when deposited on the Amazon rainforest help to fertilize the soil. Some 180 million tons are precipitated each year. The sand of the desert crosses the ocean pushed by the trade winds of the east component, the same ones that carried Columbus to America.
An article published in the magazine Nature It has also revealed how the haze has caused glacial periods throughout history. And as always happens, everything has to do directly with the amount of carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere. As the desert dust crosses the Atlantic, a part falls towards the ocean surface and the iron it contains also favors the fertilization of phytoplankton, an element that directly influences photosynthesis. This process results in a greater absorption of carbon dioxide, which passes from the atmosphere to the seabed. According to the authors of the research, this mechanism would be behind at least half the reduction of the famous greenhouse gas during the glacial stages.
What relates to the haze with the ice ages and the proposal of a possible mitigation strategy?
He told it in the previous episode of haze on the islands
????https://t.co/r3hmRKj4UB– Pedro J. Hdez (@ecosdelfuturo) February 17, 2021
The influence of iron was discovered in 1987 by the American oceanographer John Martin after analyzing ancient air bubbles trapped in ice cores of Antarctica, which allow scientists to travel in time to know the composition of the atmosphere of the past. Martin proposed that this element has had a remarkable impact to the point of having transformed the surface of the ocean during the last Ice Age. As usual, the scientific community reacted with skepticism to his theory, but up to eight experiments carried out between 1993 and 2005 confirmed the thesis of the relationship between iron, the increase in seaweed and the decrease in carbon dioxide.
Xavier Fonseca
The voice
An article in Science proposes a solution for the anomaly that occurred 700,000 years ago and that changed the climate system forever.
The story of the climate on Earth is the story of a complex and dynamic system, which allows life on the planet, but which has undergone enormous upheaval. The cold and warm stages have been going on for eons. The scientific community discovered last century that behind the climatic cycles is the Earth’s orbit. Its eccentricity, which draws an ellipse or a circle, and which determines the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface, changes at a rate of forty thousand years. However, around 700,000 ago, during the Middle Pleistocene, that cycle was altered. Suddenly, it was a hundred thousand years old, just as it is today. That is to say, after that period, the world enters an ice age.
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