Why the earth is getting dark

The planet earth, little by little, is darkening. Or, in other words: during the last 20 years the amount of light that the earth emits towards space has been

Why the earth is getting dark

The planet earth, little by little, is darkening. Or, in other words: during the last 20 years the amount of light that the earth emits towards space has been decreasing considerably.

This is revealed by a recently published study at Geophysical Research Letters, where researchers in charge of their realization (which come from the Big Bear Solar Observatory, in California; the University of New York; the Institute of Astrophysics of Canarias and the University of La Laguna) They say that this is due, in part, to the heating of the oceans.

"The reflectance of the Earth is a fundamental climate parameter that we have measured from the Big Bear Solar Observatory between 1998 and 2017 by observing land light with modern photometric techniques to accurately determine daily, monthly, seasonal, annual and late changes In Terrestrial albed, "they explain.

Thus, one of its conclusions is that there has been a "gradual, but climatologically significant decline" of 0.5 watts per square meter in these two decades. "We do not find correlation between changes in terrestrial albedo and solar activity measures," they add.

These figures are equivalent, according to the EFE agency, to which the Earth has lost 0.5% reflectance, which reflects about 30% of sunlight that illuminates it.

This darkening of the Earth will have consequences since by increasing the amount of solar energy that is needed is contributing to the global warming of the planet. Therefore, researchers assure that they expect the results of their study "stimulate the resumption and revitalization of landlight observations with new automated telescopes, 'DScovr' type observations, missions 'cubesat' or even a lunar observatory ", Sentence.

Date Of Update: 20 October 2021, 18:36