Pols, surprisingly, is an incredibly important thing to study. Scientists know that dust particles pass through the Earth’s atmosphere, are collected by the wind and then scattered across oceans and continents, away from the deserts that produce them. But its effect on man-made climate change, for example, still eludes scientists.
In fact, dust particles that fly high could be changing the Earth’s temperature. In what direction they tilt the thermometer is still unknown. This week, NASA’s EMIT mission, which is the abbreviation for Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation, is being installed in its new home in space. From its new 248-mile-high pole on the planet, EMIT can begin the ambitious task of making a billion unique observations about these “mineral aerosols”. This data will help a research team determine if the dust is cooling or warming the planet and could lead to a better understanding of climate science.
On Thursday, the space agency carried more than 5,800 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. This submission included several scientific experiments, such as the Suture in Space project. EMIT also sailed on board. Once unpacked from a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship, the robotic arm of the space station will board the mission and place it outside the orbiting laboratory. There, EMIT will spend a year learning where the dust lives.
Why does it matter – Dust is important for many reasons.
For example, dust is a harbinger of life. Particles are food for microorganisms. If dust settles in the ocean, it can stimulate algae flowering. It can also provide nutrition to distant rainforests. Dust from the Sahara Desert can travel thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean, for example, and settle in the Amazon Basin.
Dust also accelerates the melting of ice. “In fact, the Colorado River has less water because of the way dust lands on the Colorado snow pack,” EMIT principal investigator Robert Green told Inverse. “It makes it melt sooner.”
An excess of these particles can also form very high dust walls called haboobs. These create dangerous breathing conditions and poor visibility. There has been a rise in haboobs in West Texas, which hit headlines earlier this summer.
A 2016 dust storm in Death Valley, California, was associated with a record-breaking heat. Pacific Press / LightRocket / Getty Images
Hoboobs are natural exposures, but they increase with desertification. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s produced several of these ominous clouds. Bad policies and drought were largely to blame for the great American calamity, which killed crops and livestock and forced mass migrations from the Great Plains.
“I’m worried about a new Dust Bowl,” EMIT co-researcher Gregory Okin told Inverse.
Okin has spent his career studying deserts.
The Dust Bowl in New Mexico, 1935. Heritage Images / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
“As we get into warmer climates … for every degree of temperature we go up, you’ll get less money in terms of the value of every drop of rain,” Okin says. “The hotter it gets, the more the rain evaporates and therefore the less it can be used inside a plant.”
The need for water will only get worse, Okin says. “[During] In warmer climates there will be more demand for water, and at the same time … there will be longer periods of drought, as we are observing in the western US and the central and southern Great Plains. There was the Dust Bowl. We are looking at a world where … the weather is pushing us towards Dust Bowl conditions, certainly in the coming decades. “
What follows – To understand the effects of dust on an ever-changing planet, EMIT will study sunlight hitting dust on earth and in the sky.
EMIT will drastically expand what is known about the dust cycle.
“The Earth has a cycle of mineral dust,” Green says. “What we want to know is what kind of dust is likely to be in the atmosphere. To know that, we need to know what the regions of origin are, in Africa, in the [western U.S.]in Australia, in South America “.
The scope of the pulse cycle is immense and EMIT has to start somewhere. Okin tells Inverse that the team will consider its current mission a success if they can determine how much solar energy remains in the atmosphere or leaves it. This phenomenon is called radiative forcing.
Green says EMIT will drastically expand what is known about the dust cycle, based on the 5,000 analyzes used in modern models and with the goal of gathering a billion direct observations.
Scientists will unpack the light that reflects dust through a process called spectroscopy, which analyzes sunlight to find the chemical fingerprints of dust. They will learn the composition of these particles, and this in turn will reveal whether they are likely to retain heat, reflect it into space, and what corner of the planet they come from.
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