Earth Day 2011 Reminder

April 22 is International Earth Day (also known as Earth Day) launched by Mr. Gaylord Nelson, former Democratic Senator of Wisconsin, USA on April 22, 1970 with 20 million participants. Until now, this day is still celebrated every year with a series of activities such as planting trees, cleaning up trash and campaigning for a clean environment.

You hear about climate change all the time, but you think it doesn’t really affect your life. Think again! Scientists are doing some groundbreaking research on the Earth’s climate “tipping points.” These are points where the climate will suddenly change, causing profound changes to life on Earth. These changes are closely related, they occur in cycles, and they are affected by human activities. Scientists have come up with some obvious signs that make it hard for people to ignore. The information is compiled and posted on the Discovery page.

Arctic Sea Ice is Melting

The Arctic ice sheet, which covers more than 14.8 million square kilometers, is melting faster than scientists predicted a year ago. The Northern Hemisphere ice cap has now become an ice island, with ice at both ends melting, leaving it isolated from the other continents.

Ice is a mirror that reflects solar radiation back into space. Now, as the ice sheet shrinks, the oceans are forced to absorb more radiation, and temperatures are rising. The result is warmer winters, and further shrinking ice. Scientists predict that in the next 10 to 60 years, there will be no more ice in the North Sea in the summer.

The Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are Under Threat

During the summer months, the Greenland ice sheet (about 2.9 million cubic kilometers in volume) melts and forms lakes on the surface of the ice sheet. Scientists have observed that many of these lakes disappear within a day, and they think that the water in these lakes drains down, smoothing the bottom of the glaciers, causing them to flow more quickly to the sea, where they are quickly broken into individual icebergs and then melted into the sea. Many areas of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are also thinning rapidly. The worst-case scenario is that the melting of these areas will cause sea levels to rise by more than 12 meters in the next 300 years.

Greenhouse gases from permafrost

Permafrost is found in North America, Greenland, Europe, and Russia. An estimated 1,672 million tons of carbon—more than twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere today—is stored in organic matter in these layers. When the permafrost thaws, greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane will escape into the atmosphere. Plants living in these areas will not be able to absorb and metabolize the huge amount of gases, causing the planet to warm even more.

Gas hydrates escaping from the ocean floor

Gas hydrates (also known as flammable ice) are frozen crystals of a compound consisting of water and natural gases such as methane. They are present in sedimentary layers at a depth of about 500m or more below the sea surface. When these gas hydrates escape due to the impact of temperature or other physical collisions, they can cause giant explosions in the ocean and release methane gas into the atmosphere. Studies have determined that in the history of the earth, the above disaster has occurred at least twice - 180 million years ago and 55 million years ago, both due to the earth's temperature being too warm at that time.

Fossil fuel usage habits

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, as fuel for household appliances, to provide energy for vehicles and to produce other products such as plastics, asphalt, cosmetics, etc. Scientists say that the use of fossil fuels (through burning) has emitted about 6.3-8.5 billion tons of CO2 each year. Meanwhile, our planet is only capable of absorbing and converting half of the above emissions. Thus, each year the atmosphere accumulates about 3 billion tons of greenhouse gases.

The forests are crying out for help.

Satellite images of the Amazon basin taken in 1975, 1989, and 2001.
From left to right, these images show the urbanization taking place in the area.
formerly jungle

The forests on our planet have a special mission: to absorb and transform CO2. However, due to indiscriminate logging, agricultural activities and other human activities, the area of ​​forests on earth is shrinking day by day. For example, the Amazon rainforest will be at risk of disappearing within the next 50 years if humans continue to destroy it at the current rate. Africa - where 90% of the population uses fuel extracted from forests - is where deforestation is most severe, with a rate twice the world's deforestation rate. And as a necessary consequence, losing forests will mean losing "factories" that process CO2, and the earth will continue to warm.

El Nino phenomenon is becoming more common

Today, El Nino is used to describe an unusual warming of the ocean. El Nino typically occurs every 8 to 11 years, with shorter cycles of 2 to 3 years. Between these unusually warm periods, the opposite phenomenon occurs, with cooling of the ocean, known as La Nina.

When it appears, in addition to affecting fishing activities, El-Nino causes severe natural disasters such as heavy rains, storms, floods in directly affected areas, or droughts and forest fires in other areas, causing great loss of life, socio-economic disasters and especially irreparable environmental damage.

Deep water masses are changing

Deep-sea water circulates around the Earth like a giant conveyor belt. Warm surface waters move north into the Atlantic Ocean, where they cool and sink. After cooling, they move around the coast of Africa, where they warm up again and rise to the surface as they drift down into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Scientists predict that within the next 100 years, global warming will disrupt the formation of these deep-sea layers. The large amounts of meltwater from glaciers combined with rising temperatures will seriously alter the way weather systems operate, causing profound climate change around the world.

Oceans are acidifying and losing oxygen

The oceans on earth can be likened to carbon sinks because CO2 from the atmosphere is absorbed by seawater. Therefore, with the huge amount of CO2 in the atmosphere as it is today, the seawater is becoming more and more acidic. Acidified seawater will damage the life of coral reefs as well as the life of marine organisms in general, the most serious damage is the disruption of the food chain in the seas. As the oceans warm due to climate change, the ability of seawater to dissolve CO2 will decrease because this gas is less soluble in warm water. Therefore, this greenhouse gas will accumulate more and more in the atmosphere and continue to cause chain effects.

According to VietNamNet