NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Survey (EMIT) mission has produced the first comprehensive map of minerals found in Earth’s dust source regions.
Created with data collected by an imaging spectrometer through November 2023. international space station (ISS) shows the precise locations of 10 important minerals based on how they reflect and absorb light.
As wind currents pick up particles of these minerals and disperse them around the world, the particles can absorb or reflect light depending on their color. Therefore, such minerals can create climate effects by cooling or warming the atmosphere. This means that the new EMIT map may provide a better picture of mineral distribution around the world. Soilhelps scientists better understand the abundance of these particles and ultimately find out whether they have a net cooling or warming effect. This will lead to better climate models; This is essential as the human-caused climate crisis continues to worsen.
“Wherever we need chemistry to understand something on the surface, we can do this with imaging spectroscopy,” said Roger Clark, EMIT science team member and Planetary Science Institute researcher. he said in a statement. “Now we will see the big picture with EMIT and it will definitely open some eyes.”
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Developed by EMIT NASA‘S Jet Propulsion Laboratory The satellite, located in Southern California, reached the ISS in 2022. The spectrometer has been examining the Earth’s surface from an altitude of approximately 410 kilometers since August of the same year.
‘Big picture’ climate science
EMIT’s low Earth orbit vantage point allows the system to analyze areas of our planet that ground-based geologists would not have a chance to reach. In fact, it can even disintegrate areas that are inaccessible to the instruments carried by planes; Moreover, it can provide the same kind of detail possible with close-range, Earth-based surveys.
During its approximately 17-month operation, EMIT captured approximately 55,000 50 by 50 miles (80 by 80 kilometers) images of Earth across a targeted study area. Comprised of billions of measurements, these images include “views” of the 6,900-mile-wide (11,000-kilometer-wide) belt in the central part of our planet that is home to dusty, arid regions.
In addition to creating detailed maps of the surface composition of these selected regions, EMIT was also able to detect clouds of greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide emerging from Earth-centered regions such as landfills, oil facilities, and other man-made sites. infrastructure.
With research like this, EMIT will give scientists insight into how dust particles move. earth atmosphere, where they come from and in what quantity. This will help determine their color and whether they reflect light more strongly. Data like this had been available to scientists before, but they were only from around 5,000 places; EMIT presents billions of examples and in much more detail.
“We’ll take the new maps and put them into our climate models and from that we’ll learn how much of the aerosols are absorbing heat or reflecting it to a much greater extent than we knew in the past,” said Natalie Mahowald. EMIT’s deputy principal investigator, a Cornell University scientist, said in the statement.
Measuring ecosystem impacts
EMIT will have scientific impact in areas beyond climate.
Scientists say the data collected from the ISS can be used to analyze the impact of wind-borne dust on ecosystems where it falls. This is important because there is evidence that when particles fall into the ocean, they stimulate the growth of phytoplankton blooms. These microscopic algal blooms can be beneficial in some ways, but they can also be responsible for toxins accumulating in ocean ecosystems. These toxins harm marine species and eventually humans through the food chain.
This wind-blown dust can also have positive effects. For example, when dust from the Andes Mountains of South America lands in northern and sub-Saharan Africa, it nutrients It is necessary for the growth of rainforests in the Amazon Basin. Using EMIT data, scientists can track the distribution of vital elements such as phosphorus, calcium and potassium for this fertilization process.
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“EMIT can help us create more complex and precisely resolved dust transport models to track the movement of these nutrients over long distances,” Yale University soil scientist Eric Slessarev said in a statement. “This will help us better understand the chemistry of soils in places far away from dust-producing regions.”
EMIT data can also be used to identify vegetation, snow and ice, as well as human-created materials on and above the Earth’s surface.
“Up to this point we didn’t know the distribution of surface minerals over large areas of the planet. A new generation of science will probably emerge that we don’t know about yet, and that’s a really cool thing.” “Mine mapping pioneer and JPL data scientist Phil Brodrick added.