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W With more than 1,300 satellites orbiting the Earth at one point, one would think that we would know everything about this planet that you need to know. But the age of exploration is far from over, researchers say in a new study Science released Thursday. Just as Hernando de Soto discovered the great Mississippi River in 1541, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Texas A & M University mapped a multitude of new watercourses, which shows that we have 44% more.
NASA-funded researchers, led by Tamlin Pavelsky, Ph.D., associate professor of global hydrology at UNC-Chapel Hill, were not there for the glory of discovery. On the contrary, they were trying to understand how much water is moving on Earth because rivers and streams add a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, compounding the effects of climate change. It is important to know where the carbon goes, they suggest in the document, because if we can not follow it, we can not quantify the severity of our situation.
"Our new calculation helps scientists better assess how carbon dioxide moves rivers and streams into the atmosphere each year," said Pavelsky in a statement released on Thursday.
In the air of the rivers and streams of water is on the surface of the water, it is important to know the area covered by the water moving. Thus, the team turned to images taken by NASA's Landsat satellite, which used a database called Global River Widths from Landsat (GRWL), which contained more than 58 million measurements. rivers 30 meters wide. Large Landsat Database (GRWL) Rivers “/>
By feeding the GRWL data into a statistical model constructed by Pavelsky, the team calculated the total area of the Earth covered by streams and rivers. In total, they measured approximately 773,000 square kilometers (298,457 square miles), about the same size as all of Italy or the Philippines. It's a lot more water moving – and much more room for carbon dioxide exchange – than we ever thought, which is problematic.
"We found that rivers and streams play a more important role. currently represented in global carbon budgets, "writes the team. Increased river surface estimates are "particularly pronounced" in the Arctic, they note, which are already particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
The good news, besides the fact that we now have 44% more rivers than we thought we had, is that we can better track how much carbon dioxide is being released in the world. atmosphere because of human behavior. The bad news is that, given all these new rivers, the amount of carbon dioxide actually released will be even harder to mitigate.
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