As global air temperatures increase, the number of Antarctic meteorites shrinks. By 2050, about a quarter of the 3-800,000 meteorites there will melt away, according to a report from a team of researchers from Switzerland and Belgium.
The team drew upon artificial intelligence, satellite observations, and climate model projections to determine that, for every tenth of a degree increase in global air temperature, an average of nearly 9,000 meteorites will disappear from Antarctica’s ice sheet.
Besides serving as an alarming indicator of climate change, the meteorites’ melting deprives scientists of materials that can help tell the story about how the solar system was born because meteorites bring materials from throughout space — from the moon, Mars, or other planets — down to Earth.
“Every time we find a meteorite, we are in fact sampling space,” says Harry Zekollari, one of the study’s co-author. Zekollari, who co-led the study while working ...
