New clues come to surface about Antartica’s past while enormous Ice Berg floats away, 23 km from British Research Station. Meanwhile in other parts of the planet, efforts are being conducted in order to monitor forest loss and methane emissions from pipelines.
How Antartica and the other continents evolved
In Antartica, it was the first time, an international team of scientists has analysed magnetic data from ESA’s Swarm satellite mission jointly with aeromagnetic data to reveal geological findings hidden underneath the continent’s ice sheets, and to find Geological correlations with its past neighbours.
The research team responsible for these finding belongs to Germany’s Kiel University, the British Antarctic Survey and National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics, and Witwatersrand University in South Africa.
By using Satellite measurements of the magnetic field, the team of scientists, identified links and correlations between the main tectonic signatures of East Antarctica and its past Gondwana neighbours. It is concluded that, “…Is clearly seen both in the well-established link between Australia and Antarctica and the less-explored link between the interior of Southern Africa and Antarctica. …Satellite data show furthermore the huge potential for reinterpreting the link between India and East Antarctica…”
New close up view of the crack responsible for creating a mega-iceberg was released,
In last weeks we were surprised (or not) by the new 1,290 sq-km / 500 sq-mile Iceberg slowly drifting away from Antartica, after rifts opened rapidly across the ice and raised concerns about the shelf’s stability two years ago. The break was first detected by GPS equipment on February 26, 2021, and then confirmed the next day with radar images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1A satellite.
One of the agencies looking in to this carefully is the British Antarctic Survey, since its Halley Research Station, is positioned about 23 km from the rift. Very little Science has been done and because of the Pandemic the base is unoccupied. Now all we can do is to wait and see if “A74” collides with the western part of the Brunt, possibly initiating a second calving even closer to Halley Research Station.
Deforestation in Indonesia declined significantly between 2017 and 2019.
In Indonesia Landsat Imagery has been used to monitor forests and logging activities. Even though it just covers 1% of the Earth land surface, it is the home for 10% of world’s know plant species, 12% of mammals and 17% of bird species. And if we sum all the rainforest in the 18,00 islands it would ranked 3rd in area next to Brasil and Congo.
During the last decades we have seen high rates of forest loss in all rainforests including Indonesia. A team from the University of Maryland, processed forest change data from Landsat Satellites to analise deforestation trends and patterns. They concluded deforestation declined significantly between 2017–2019. This does not mean deforestation is controlled across all Indonesia, since other areas are seeing rapid growth and need to be monitored, like Papua.
Scientists are now able to detect individual methane plumes leaking from natural gas pipelines,
Methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases responsible for climate change, is also one of the most used sources for heating in many households. Last year Kayrros, a European Tech Start-up started being capable of detecting individual methane emission by combining data from Sentinel-5p and Sentinel-2 missions.
As use case for this new capably the team decided to carefully monitor two pipelines. The Yamal-Europe pipeline, a 4196 km pipeline connecting Siberia, Belarus, Poland and Germany. And the Brotherhood pipeline, also around the same size connecting Siberia to Ukraine, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, Benelux, France, Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. Last year, in the first pipeline, 13 events were detected, with loss rates up to 164 tonnes per hour while in the second this number reached 33, with rates up to 291 tonnes per hour.
When comparing the year of 2019 with 2020, even taking into account the drop in demand caused by the pandemic, the emissions events detected by this team increased by 40% over Russia. This can be explained though by the fact that this is a new capability and advances in the technology are making these detections more sensitive and accurate. However all events reported were confirmed by the companies operating these specific segments of the pipelines and maintenance operations are said to be planned. The same methodology was used in the US and Kazakhstan, detecting numerous of emissions from shale oil production and transportation activities.
New space and earth observation technologies are not expected to bring unprecedented and revolutionary facts to the climate change table, but are certainly crucial to measure our impact and to serve as corner stone to legislative and non-legislative actions in the energy, agriculture and waste sectors which are responsible for around 95% of methane emissions associated with human activity worldwide.
