Skip to main content

Earth's shine seems to be fading due to global warming as the oceans heat up

 

Earth's shine

In recent years, the climate change crisis has escalated to unprecedented levels, resulting in unimaginable and life-changing consequences. An acclaimed new study contends that global warming is dimming our planet, literally!

Global warming is causing the Earth's brightness to decrease, according to a new study. Now you're probably wondering, "how do you even measure something like that?" But researchers have their ways. Keeping track of the Earth's shine requires them to calculate the Earth's 'albedo', or reflectance. The albedo is calculated utilizing something called the 'earthshine'.


The crescent moon is most noticeable immediately after sunset or before sunrise, when its dazzling crescent gives way to a dark disc with a faint glow. A crescent moon's unlit parts are known as earthshine because they are glowing from the light reflected from the Earth.

The study revealed that earthshine data over the last three years indicates that our home planet is reflected almost half a watt less light than it did 20 years ago. This is equivalent to a 0.5% reduction in Earth's reflectance.

Earth's shine

Between 1998 and 2017, researchers studied earthshine at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California to determine the Earth's 'albedo.' Over 1,500 nights of data were collected. This analysis allowed them to calculate the amount of light reflected by the planet.


Comments

  1. ANewsOctober 13, 2025 at 9:27 PM

    The dance between curiosity and discovery never fails to leave me in awe—it's a reminder that even in the familiar, there are hidden depths waiting to be explored. What a beautifully woven perspective that invites us to look closer and think deeper. 🌙 darkmarket link

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mechanical and optical mouse

  How does the Mechanical Mouse work? A mechanical mouse consists of a heavy rubber ball whose movement makes the cursor move on the screen. Commonly known as the ‘rolling rubber ball’ mouse, it is considerably heavy, thanks to the rubber ball, a few wheels, and a number of other mechanical parts present inside it. When you move the mouse, the ball rolls beneath it, pushing the two plastic wheels/rollers linked to it in the process. One of those wheels detects side-to-side movement (x-axis wheel) and the other (y-axis wheel) detects movement in the up-and-down direction. Both of these wheels consist of spokes that ‘break’ a thin light beam inside the mouse. The number of times the beam breaks helps to calculate how far the mouse has moved. For instance, when you move the mouse straight up, the y-axis wheel turns. The farther up you go, the more the ball pushes the wheel and the more it breaks the light beam. This helps to determine how far the mouse has moved straight up....
Post a Comment
Read more

How do Ants sense Food?

  S ugar has a slight odor, particularly granulated beet sugar. While all species of ants can differentiate between a wide variety of odors, the smelling range differs from a few centimeters to meters. Desert ants can smell sugar from up to 3 meters. the food sources that ants cannot smell from a distance they 'smell' it (contact chemoreception) by touching it. So in a way, all the food they detect, they detect it by smelling. So yes, ants smell (although contact chemoreception is more like taste) the sugar. The ant colonies send scout ants to search for food in various directions, often up to a range of 100 to 200 meters.(Depends on the territorial boundary and time of the year). The scout marches steadily in less circuitous paths initially if it has memories of previous feeder locations. (Ants use visual landmarks, and a stereo-smell system to create an odor map and navigate) Periodically it will halt and look for olfactory cues. It will then take into a more circuitous rando...
Post a Comment
Read more