26d • 🧠 Knowledge
Fun fact: Overlooked effect of melting ice caps ❄️❄️🥶🥶
Antarctica and the Arctic doesn't just house thousands of unique species. The two continent also plays a crucial role in conditioning the temperature of the Earth, and managing climate in most part of the world. Yet a lot of this consequences is overlooked and left to worsen by the years.🌡️🔥
Ice caps melting decrease the overall efficiency of the albedo effect on the Earth. Firstly, we need to know what is the albedo effect, the term measure a surface's reflectivity, describing how much sunlight it bounces back into space versus absorbing it as heat. Ice and snow have a very high albedo because of its color white and reflective quality. For thousands of year, Antarctica and the Arctic have played a crucial role in reducing the temperature of the Earth. In todays time, the reduction in area of these continent have significantly reduce it's albedo, increasing the temperature of our planet and melting more ice caps, this is called a positive feedback loop (A system where the output or result of a process amplifies the original input, causing a chain reaction that escalates the effect).☀️🌏
To understand the second affect of ice caps melting, it is essential to understand the role of ocean movement and circulation. Ocean movement can be separate into 2 parts, the surface level and the deep water level. The movement in the surface level is generated by wind and pulling the water layer beneath it, combining with the Earth rotation, this forms circular motion at the surface. Regarding the deep water region the thermohaline circulation is the vertical movement of the deep ocean power by the difference in density of water and temperature. The ocean water in the two poles is significantly colder and more salty, the density differences pushes it down and replace by warmer water at the bottom, this convection like current forces microorganism to move up and down the ocean level, feeding species and forming the basis for thousands of food chain. As we all know, the majority of ice caps is consist of fresh water, when these ice melts, its deposit huge amount of water with lower density than saline water from the ocean. Overtime, this will disrupt the thermohaline circulation, damaging marines life. 🐬🐠
Nguyễn Khang Ninh - 10IG2S3 - Biology
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Fun fact: Overlooked effect of melting ice caps ❄️❄️🥶🥶
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