There’s something in the air…
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Could wildfire smoke in the Amazon reach… the South Pole?!
Enter Sudip Chakraborty from the University of Maryland.
He used satellite data to track black carbon, a chemical produced by combustion. His team determined the impact of pollution with machine learning.
They correlated Amazon wildfires with unusual ice melting in the Antarctic Sea!
Pollution from the wildfires travelled four thousand miles to Antarctica! Black carbon traps heat and reduces the ice’s reflectiveness. Both effects contribute to climate change and speed up the melting of sea ice.
If the slash-and-burn in the Amazon continues, we’ll all be feeling the heat!
Reference: Chakraborty, S., Devnath, M. K., Jabeli, A., Kulkarni, C., Boteju, G., Wang, J., & Janeja, V. P. (2025). Impact of increased anthropogenic Amazon wildfires on Antarctic sea ice melt via albedo reduction. Environmental Data Science, 4. https://doi.org/10.1017/eds.2025.1