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An Airbus A340, a wide-body airliner, lands on the Antarctic continent
Photo: via www.imago-images.de / Cover-Images / IMAGO
83 tons of black carbon - that's how big is the contribution that every visitor to Antarctica makes to the melting of the ice sheet there.
This is the result of a study published in the journal Nature Communications.
Black carbon can be thought of as extremely fine soot.
It is formed when fossil fuels or biomass are burned.
When the fine particles settle on a white surface – like snow – the now darker surface heats up more.
The black film makes the snow melt faster.
74,000 tourists in one season
The human presence on the Antarctic continent has increased significantly in recent decades: According to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, an international association of tour operators, more than 74,000 tourists visited Antarctica in the 2019/2020 season.
That's almost twice as many as a decade ago.
The summer high season in Antarctica usually lasts from November to March.
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Black carbon pollution, which everyone causes indirectly via ships, airplanes and diesel generators, leads to an additional 23 millimeters of snowmelt in the most visited areas every summer.
For this study, an international team of scientists took annual snow samples between 2016 and 2020 at 28 locations stretching over 2000 km from the northern tip of Antarctica to the Ellsworth Mountains.
An estimated 53,000 tourists traveled to Antarctica during the period of the study.
The contribution of researchers is even ten times higher than that of a tourist.
All scientists used ships, airplanes, helicopters and generators - and usually fossil fuels to power these vehicles and devices.
The snow in Antarctica is still the cleanest in the world
So far, Antarctica's snow is the cleanest in the world - its baseline value for black carbon is about one part per billion.
"That's 1,000 times less than in the Himalayas and 100 times less than in the Andes or in the Rocky Mountains," said Raúl Cordero of the University of Santiago de Chile, a co-author of the study.
At some locations on the Antarctic Peninsula, however, the concentration is now two to four times higher than in other parts of the continent.
Cordero called for a discussion on whether the number of tourists in Antarctica might need to be limited.
Above all, no more fossil fuels should be burned.
Cordero pointed out that far less snow and ice would melt from pollution than was lost to global warming.
However, the study underlines the need for a transition to renewable energy sources - also in Antarctic research: Technical alternatives to diesel are already available.
The Belgian Princess Elisabeth research station, for example, is mainly operated by wind power.
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