Former Google CEO to discover Antarctic waters provides boat unmanned aircraft
Created Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt provides a project to send drones to the violent ocean around Antarctica to collect data that can help solve an important climate puzzle. The project is part of a set of budgets announced today from Schmidt science, which Schmidt and his wife Wendy have created to focus on projects that have created research on the global carbon cycle. The $ 45 million will cost to fund these projects, which include Antarctic research.
“The ocean provides a truly important climate for all of us, but we don’t understand it as we could,” says Gallon McCainley, a professor of environmental science at the University of Colombia and the Lamont Dukertian Earth Observatory and one of the main scientists of the project. “I am really excited to see that these data can really gather the community of people who try to understand and determine the quantity of the ocean carbon sink.”
The oceans of the world are the largest carbon sinks that attract about one -third of the CO2 humans they put in the atmosphere each year. One of the most important carbon sinks, the South Ocean, is the body of water around Antarctica. Despite the second five ocean in the world, the South Ocean is responsible for about 40 % of the total ocean -based carbon dioxide absorption.
However, scientists are surprised to know why the South Ocean is exactly the success of such carbon sink. In addition, climate models that successfully anticipate the ocean’s carbon absorption elsewhere in the world are significantly different when talking to the South Ocean.
One of the biggest issues related to understanding more about what is happening in the South Ocean is just not. This is thanks to the intense conditions of the area. The Drake’s crossing, which moves between South America and Argentina, is one of the toughest oceans for ships, due to extremely strong currents around Antarctica and dangerous winds. It is even harder in the winter months. CRISP says the ocean also has a special cloud cover, which makes satellite observations difficult.
“The South Ocean is really far away, so we haven’t just done a lot of science there,” says McCainley. “It’s a very large ocean, and this place is impressive and scary.”
