2011 Earth Day Human Reminder

April 22 is the Earth International Day (aka Earth Day) launched by Gaylord Nelson, a former Wisconsin Democratic senator on April 22, 1970 with 20 million participants. . So far, this year has been celebrated annually with a series of activities such as planting trees, clearing garbage and mobilizing for a clean and beautiful environment.

You often hear about climate change, but you don't think it will affect your life very much. Think it again! Scientists are conducting some groundbreaking research on the 'critical points' of the climate on the earth. These points are the time when the climate will suddenly change, causing profound fluctuations in the lives of living things on earth. These transformation processes are closely related, they occur periodically and are affected by human activities. Scientists have given a few signs of money labels that make it more difficult for people to be indifferent. Information is aggregated and posted on Discovery page .

Ice in the Arctic Sea is melting

The ice sheet, which is more than 14.8 million square kilometers in the Arctic, is melting faster than scientists predicted a year ago. The Northern Hemisphere's ice now has become an ice island when ice at both ends has melted, making it an ice island independent of other continents.

Ice is a mirror reflecting solar radiation back into space. Now, when the area of ​​ice islands is shrinking, the oceans are forced to absorb larger amounts of radiation, and the temperature also increases. The consequence is that the winter is getting warmer, and the ice areas continue to be narrowed. Scientists predict that in the next 10-60 years, the North Sea ice will no longer be present in the summer.

Greenland ice island and West Antarctic ice sheets are under threat

In the summer months, ice on Greenland (about 2.9 million cubic kilometers) melted and formed lakes on the surface of the island. Scientists observed and found that many of these lakes disappeared within a day, and they thought that the water in these lakes had escaped to the bottom, smoothing the bottom of the glaciers, causing the rivers. This ice floats faster into the sea where they are quickly separated into individual ice sheets and then dissolved into seawater. Many areas on the West Antarctic ice sheet are also rapidly shrinking. The worst scenario that we should think about is that melting ice from these areas will cause sea level rise of more than 12m over the next 300 years.

Greenhouse gases from permafrost

The permafrost is located in North America, Greenland, Europe and Russia. It is estimated that about 1,672 million tons of carbon - more than double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere today - is stored in organic matter in these soil layers. When this frozen layer melts, greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane will escape into the atmosphere. At that time, the plants that live in these areas will not be able to absorb and metabolize the huge amount of gas, resulting in the warming of the earth.

Hydrate gas escapes from the ocean floor

Gas hydrates (also known as burnt ice) are frozen crystals of compounds consisting of water and natural gases such as methane. They are present in sediments at a depth of about 500m or more under the sea surface. When these gas hydrates are released due to the effects of temperature or other physical collisions, they can cause huge explosions in the ocean and release methane gas into the atmosphere. Studies have determined that, in the history of the earth, the disaster has been at least twice - 180 million years ago and 55 million years ago, all due to the temperature of the earth when it was too warm.

The habit of using fossil fuels

Fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, propane and coal have been widely exploited and used by humans for hundreds of years. They are used to generate electricity, to make household fuel, to provide energy for vehicles and to produce other products such as plastics, asphalt, cosmetics, etc. Scientists said, the use of fossil fuels (through burning) has emitted about 6.3-8.5 billion tons of CO2 per year. Meanwhile, our planet is only capable of absorbing and converting thải of the above emissions. So every year, the atmosphere stagnates with more than 3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

Forests are calling for help

Photograph of an Amazon basin from satellites in 1975, 1989, 2001. From left to right, these images show the process of urbanization taking place in the area where the forest was formerly.

The forests on our planet have a special mission: to absorb and convert CO2. However, due to indiscriminate exploitation of forests, agricultural activities and other human activities, the forest area on earth is getting smaller and smaller. For example, the Amazon rainforest will risk disappearing in the next 50 years if people continue to wreak havoc today. Africa - where 90% of the population uses fuel extracted from forests - is where deforestation is most severe at twice the rate of the world's deforestation rate. And as an inevitable consequence, deforestation will mean the loss of CO2 plants, and the earth continues to heat up.

El Nino phenomenon is increasingly popular

Today, El-Nino is used to denote unusual warming of seawater. El-Nino is often repeated with a cycle of 8 to 11 years, a shorter cycle of 2 to 3 years. Between these unusual warming periods, sometimes the opposite is happening, the cold seawater is also called La-Nina.

When appearing, in addition to affecting fishing activities, El-Nino caused heavy disasters such as heavy rain, storms and floods in areas directly affected, or drought, forest fires in the region. other, causing great damage to people, socio-economic disasters and especially irreparable environmental damage.

Deep water blocks are changing

Ocean floor water always circulates around the earth like a giant conveyor belt. The warm water layers on the surface move north into the Atlantic Ocean and then cool and sink to the lower floor. After this cooling process, these currents move around the offshore area of ​​Africa, where they are warmed and surfaced when floating down the Indian and Pacific oceans. Scientists predict that in the next 100 years, global warming will interfere with the process of forming these deep water layers. A large amount of melting water from glaciers plus rising temperatures will seriously change the process of weathering, causing profound climate changes around the world.

The oceans are acidified and reduce the oxygen content

Earth oceans can be likened to carbon pools because carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is absorbed by seawater. So, with the huge amount of CO ₂ in the atmosphere today, the sea water becomes more and more acidified. Acidified seawater will hurt the life of coral reefs as well as the life of marine life in general, but the most serious damage is to break the food chain in the seas. When the oceans warm up due to climate change, seawater's CO ₂ solubility is reduced because it is harder to dissolve in warm water. Therefore, this greenhouse gas will remain in abundance in the atmosphere and continue to cause chain consequences.