Geologists do not stop predicting the possible consequences of global warming. The authors of the National Geographic magazine wondered what would happen to the Earth if, under the influence of high temperatures, all the ice that is on the planet today melts? It is reported by Day.Az with reference to Newsru.com.
They calculated all the possible consequences and created interactive map, which clearly showed scenarios for the development of events for each of the continents.
First, if the ice melts, according to scientists, the sea level on Earth will rise by about 65 meters. As a result average temperature on the planet will rise from 14 to 26 degrees.
In North America, the entire Atlantic coast of the United States, including Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, will sink into the water. Most of California will also be under water. In Latin America, it will flood the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires, as well as coastal Uruguay and Paraguay.
Africa will largely remain untouched, but much of it will become uninhabited.
In Egypt, as a result of rising water levels in the Mediterranean Sea, "wetlands" will be ancient city Alexandria and Cairo. Many famous landmarks of Europe will also be destroyed. London, Venice will disappear. Under water will be the Netherlands and most of Denmark.
In Asia, the water will flood areas that today are home to about 600 million Chinese. Washed off the face of the Earth will be Bangladesh and the coastal regions of India.
As for Australia, there the melting of ice will lead to the formation of a whole sea right in the center of the continent. In addition, vast coastal lands, where more than 80% of the population lives today, will be flooded. Antarctica will become completely unrecognizable.
Ecologists say that the process of ice melting depends on a number of factors. Among them, the rate of increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and others. However, National Geographic warns that you shouldn't be too scared just yet. The process of melting ice is monitored by specialists from all over the world, and, according to their calculations, it will take about five thousand years for all the ice on Earth to melt.
North America
All cities located on the east coast and in the Gulf of Mexico will be buried under water. The hills of San Francisco will become islands. Cuba will also suffer, the Gulf of California will increase.
South America
The Amazon Basin will turn into a bay. The same process will affect the rivers in Paraguay. Thus, the water will absorb Buenos Aires, the coast of Uruguay and a large territory of Paraguay. Mountain areas along the Caribbean coast will remain in their place.
Europe
London, Venice, Holland, Moldova and part of Denmark will disappear from the face of the Earth. The Black and Caspian Seas will increase in size.
Australia
The desert in the center of the mainland will become an inland sea. Coastal cities will be flooded.
As you know, global warming, as a result of which the level of the world's oceans is rising, poses a threat to our civilization. Melting ice releases millions of liters of water that threaten to flood a large number cities and countries. Our list includes well-known cities and metropolitan areas that are at risk of flooding.
Shanghai (China)
A Chinese city is threatened with complete flooding if the water rises by 6.5 meters. However, not only to him: such cities as Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou are at risk. The rise of the water level by 6.5 meters may take about 400 years. As a result of a poorly developed flood protection system, even a 1.5-meter rise in water levels by 2070 poses a risk to 5.5 million residents of Shanghai.
London, Great Britain)
To flood London, the level of the world's seas must rise by 5.5 meters. The landscape on which most of the city is located, especially the southern and eastern parts, is a swamp. At present, the Thames Barrier is a tide-protecting defense system, and according to some estimates, London will need another 375 years to repeat the fate of Atlantis.
New Orleans (USA)
This American city suffers the most from floods. As a result of Hurricane Katrina, most areas of the city were practically destroyed. The lowest levees in New Orleans have about 350 years before the ocean waters swallow them up.
New York, USA)
To flood the coastal part of the city, the ocean must rise by 3 meters. Hurricane Sandy and severe storms clearly demonstrated the need for a new flood protection system.
San Francisco (USA)
Founded on a peninsula that curves close to the mainland, this city is at risk of flooding as the world's sea level rises by 3 meters. The mountainous landscape makes it difficult to protect the territory from water.
Los Angeles, USA)
A rise in water of 3 meters threatens to flood this coastal city. According to preliminary calculations, this can happen in 200 years.
Saint-Petersburg, Russia)
The northern capital is threatened with flooding when the water level rises by 2.5 meters. The population of the city, built on the islands at the mouth of the Neva, got used to floods, but during recent years they have become more dangerous and more frequent.
Hamburg, Germany)
The second largest city in Germany is located in the floodplain of the Elbe River and is located more than 100 km from the North Sea coast. To flood Hamburg, the level of the world's seas must rise by 2.5 meters.
Amsterdam, Netherlands)
This city is threatened with flooding when the water rises by 2 meters. One-fourth of the lowland country is actually below sea level. Territories that should have been swallowed up by the sea long ago are protected by large dams. According to preliminary calculations, Amsterdam can be completely submerged in 150 years.
Venice, Italy)
The famous city of all lovers, Venice, could disappear from the face of the Earth if the world's sea level rises by just one meter. Rising water levels and their impact on local soils pose a threat to the city's intricate canal network. The catastrophic floods of 2008 and January of this year caused severe damage to buildings, the restoration of which amounts to tens of millions of dollars.
Usually they discuss what will happen with global warming. The ice will melt and the sea level will rise. Everyone has seen these cards - for Russia it will not be too critical. Some coastal areas will go under water, but nothing critical, such as for countries such as the Netherlands, England, etc.
But for example, experts believe that global cooling will bring catastrophic consequences for Russia. Look here...
Global cooling will create ice dams at the mouth of the Siberian rivers, and they will block the river flows. Water from the Ob and Yenisei, not finding an outlet to the ocean, will flood the lowlands. Excess water will fill the Turan lowland, the Aral Sea will merge with the Caspian Sea, the level of which will rise by more than 80 meters. Further, water along the Kumo-Manych depression will spill into the Don. Will go under the water Krasnodar region, part of Turkey and Bulgaria. To avoid the onset of the ice age, humanity needs to support the work of the main earth battery - the Gulf Stream.
This can be done in two ways: the first is to launch the eastern warm Kuroshio Current into the Arctic, the second is to pump the Gulf Stream to the north.
The climate is warming, and quite significant. Over the past century, the average temperature for the globe rose by 0.7-0.8 degrees. Nothing like this has happened on the planet for more than two millennia. Cycles of warming and cooling have always existed on Earth. Scientists are still arguing about what causes them. Some believe that this is caused by the changing activity of the Sun, others say that it gets colder on the planet during periods when solar system passes through dust and gas accumulations, others blame earth's axis, which constantly fluctuates and changes its angle of inclination.
Back in 1939, the Yugoslav scientist Milankovitch calculated that the Earth's climate changes in three cycles - 23,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years (they were called the Milankovitch cycles). In accordance with them, humanity is now experiencing the very heat (Great Summer), which should be replaced by cold (Great Winter). And the change will take place not for millennia, and not for centuries (as it is now with global warming) - it will take place in 10-15, maximum 50 years.
About what can cause a new ice age and how, in particular, Russia will change then, is described in the book by science popularizer Valery Chumakov "The End of the World: Forecasts and Scenarios" (ENAS publishing house, 2010). For informational purposes, we present an excerpt from a book on global cooling.
How the Gulfstream works
The Gulf Stream is the most powerful warm current on the planet. It originates in Gulf of Mexico, where the winds drive huge masses of water through the Yucatan Strait, and goes to the north of the Atlantic, up to the islands New Earth and Spitsbergen, overcoming about 10 thousand kilometers along the way; its width is 110-120 kilometers. The current speed reaches 10 km / h.
Salty ocean water heated near the equator, moving north, gradually releases its heat into the atmosphere. Ocean winds carry warm air to the mainland and warm coastal and island states. Having reached the northernmost point, the Gulf Stream cools down completely. Its salt water is heavier than more fresh water Arctic Ocean. It descends to a depth and, having turned into a deep-sea cold Labrador current, begins its return journey south to the equator. This "lowering" ensures the continuous operation of the giant thermal conveyor, which is the Gulf Stream. The "elevator" will stop, moving the flow from one current to another - the entire conveyor will also stop. The shutdown will lead to a sharp drop in average temperatures in most of the leading countries of the world - in the USA, England, France, Germany, etc. Norway will be the worst in this case, here the temperature will immediately drop by 15-20 degrees.
For this stop, it is necessary to increase the temperature in the region of the North Pole by only 1.2 degrees. Then the melting Arctic glaciers will "merge" into the Arctic Ocean with a huge mass of fresh cold water. Mixed with the salt water of the Gulf Stream, the fresh water will greatly lighten it and prevent it from sinking to the bottom. At the end of its journey, the current will simply disperse over the surface and, having no reverse course, will stop.
But this will not happen overnight. The shutdown process will take from 2 to 7 years, during which the Gulf Stream will increasingly shift to the south, until it closes on the cold Canary Current, which is now washing the coast West Africa. At the same time, temperatures will drop in the countries of North and Western Europe and on the East Coast of the United States.
Halt of the Gulf Stream and a sharp cooling in Europe and in South America will become a kind of "trigger" that will launch a chain of further changes. The drop in temperature will cause the snow cover in these regions to last much longer. And since albedo (reflectivity) white snow about nine times higher than the albedo black earth, then the sunlight will be reflected from it almost completely, without turning into heat. A kind of chain reaction will result, which will lead to the fact that snow will cover the ground almost all year round.
Then the process of glacial advance will begin. More precisely, leaks, because glaciers are flowing - not so slowly, their speed can reach up to 7 meters per day. The cooling of the oceans will lead to the fact that it will begin to absorb from the atmosphere carbon dioxide. It will be similar to the situation with champagne: the colder it is, the less gas it releases. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be greatly reduced, and since it is a major greenhouse gas, Greenhouse effect will weaken, respectively, and the temperature on the planet will continue to fall.
All this applies mainly to coastal areas. Those territories where 40% of the world's population now lives and which produce more than half of the world's product. Russia will have different problems, but not less. A group of Russian scientists led by Valery Karnaukhov, deputy director of the Institute of Cell Biophysics (Pushchino), on the instructions of the Russian Emergencies Ministry in April 2000 calculated the scenario according to which events would develop in our country.
Russian sea
So, the Gulf Stream stopped, warm water does not enter the Arctic, and soon a huge ice dam forms along the northern coast of Russia. Large Siberian rivers rest against this dam: Yenisei, Lena, Ob, etc. After the formation of the Siberian ice dam, ice jams on the rivers will become more and more powerful, and spills - more and more extensive.
In the early 1950s, the USSR developed a project to create the West Siberian Sea. Huge dams were supposed to block the currents of the Ob and Yenisei at the exit to the ocean. As a result, the entire West Siberian lowland would have been flooded, the country would have received the world's largest Severo-Obskaya hydroelectric power station, and the evaporation of the new sea, comparable in area to the Mediterranean, should have greatly softened the sharply continental Siberian climate. However, in the area subject to flooding, they found largest reserves oil, and "seabuilding" had to be postponed.
(What happened to the temperature in the northern hemisphere over the past million years)
Now, what man could not do, nature will do. Only the ice dam will be larger than the one they were going to build. Consequently, the spill will be larger. Ice dams will finally block river flows over time. Water from the Ob and Yenisei, not finding an outlet to the ocean, will flood the lowlands. The water level in the new sea will rise until it reaches 130 meters. After that, it will begin to flow to Europe through the Turgai hollow, located in the eastern part of the Ural Mountains. The resulting stream will wash away a 40-meter layer of soil and expose the granite bottom of the hollow. As the channel expands and deepens, the level of the young sea will fall and fall to 90 meters.
Excess water will fill the Turan lowland, the Aral Sea will merge with the Caspian Sea, the level of which will rise by more than 80 meters. Further, water along the Kumo-Manych depression will spill into the Don. And these will be the great Siberian rivers Ob and Yenisei completely turned towards Europe. All the Central Asian republics will be under water, and the Don itself will turn into the most full-flowing river in the world, next to which the Amazon and Amur will look like streams. The width of the stream will reach 50 kilometers or more. The level of the Sea of Azov will rise so much that it will flood the Crimean peninsula and merge with the Black Sea. Further, the water will go through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean Sea, but the Bosphorus will not cope with such volumes. The Krasnodar Territory, part of Turkey and almost all of Bulgaria will go under water.
Scientists allocate 50-70 years for everything. By this time, the northern part of Russia, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, almost all of Great Britain, most of Germany and France will already be covered in ice.
"Atlantis" on the path of a warm current
There are other scenarios, for example, proposed by the Russian scientist Nikolay Zharvin. He and his supporters believe that the change of epochs of glaciation and warming does not occur at all because the amount of heat received by it increases or decreases. According to their theory, these giant cataclysms are caused by vertical oscillations of the two largest lithospheric plates - the North American and the North Eurasian.
The Gulf Stream 8 thousand years ago did not reach the north of Europe and America. His path was blocked by a rather extensive island, the size of Greenland. Resting against it, the current turned away and warmed not Scandinavia, as it is now, but the already warm Gibraltar. The lack of heat led to the fact that the surface of the continents already beyond the 50th parallel (the southern border of Great Britain) was covered with a layer of ice. It is believed that the ice reserve of the same Greenland was then three times more than today. Due to the fact that the mass of water accumulated in the northern glaciers, the level of the World Ocean was lower than today by 150 meters. It was during this period that people settled a lot of islands now cut off from each other, and maybe even moved from Europe to America on dry land.
The pressure of the Greenland ice on the North American plate led to the fact that, unable to withstand the load, it broke and dropped sharply into the planet, into the magma layer. This was accompanied by a monstrous earthquake and a series of powerful volcanic eruptions. When everything calmed down, it turned out that the island blocking the way to the Gulf Stream was gone. The fault went right through him, and he just plunged into the ocean depths to more than a kilometer deep. Some time later, people, remembering this fertile land washed by the tropical current, will call it Atlantis and will remember it as a lost earthly paradise.
The Gulf Stream, now not encountering any obstacles on its way, broke through to the north and began its stormy climate-forming activity there. Gradually, the Arctic warmed up and freed itself from the accumulated excess ice. Now Greenland's reserves are only a third of what it used to be - 2.7 million cubic meters. km. And this would be normal if stocks were not depleted at an ever-increasing rate. Glaciers North America in a year they lose up to 10 meters in height. When their mass drops to a critical one, a new rupture will occur and the North American plate will rush upward for about a kilometer, again revealing Atlantis to the world. Supporters of Jarvin called the future cataclysm "Icelandic steam explosion".
Masses of water vapor, escaping through the resulting cracks into the atmosphere, will cover the planet dense layer rain clouds, from which truly biblical rain will pour down on the Earth. Trillions of tons of water will fall on the continents, which will lead to the flooding of all lowland and flat areas. The earthquake will give rise to a series of powerful tsunamis that will simply wash away all coastal European and American cities. And the Gulf Stream, having again met Atlantis that has emerged from the abyss, will go south, giving rise to a new ice age.
Salvation - dam across the Bering Strait
What is the recipe for salvation - how to help the Gulf Stream? In order to avoid the onset of the ice age or to delay its arrival, humanity needs to support the work of the main earth battery - the Gulf Stream. This can be done in two ways: the first is to launch the eastern warm salty Kuroshio Current into the Arctic, the second is to pump the Gulf Stream to the north.
In 1891, the great Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen proposed to the Russian government to widen and deepen the Bering Strait in order to facilitate access to the Arctic Ocean for the rather powerful but limited Kuroshio. As a result, the climate of the Arctic would become much milder, and the navigation of the Northern Sea Route would increase significantly.
In the early 1960s, projects for warming the Arctic began to take on real features. In 1962 Soviet engineer P. Borisov suggested building a giant dam across the Bering Strait. The pumping units located in it were supposed to pump 140 thousand cubic kilometers of water from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean per year. The resulting shortage in the Arctic Ocean would be replenished by “drawing in” the warm currents of the Atlantic. So the Gulf Stream could reach the mouth of the Yenisei, where the Greenland glaciers would no longer spoil it.
If the plan is implemented Soviet Union would reduce the cost of mining in Siberia by an order of magnitude, would make the richest oil and gas-bearing regions of the country more livable and would receive an almost year-round shipping route from Europe to Asia - not bypassing, through the Suez Canal, but almost directly - through Arctic Ocean.
The idea of the Bering waterworks was so popular in the 1960s that drawings of the dam were even published in the Children's Encyclopedia, and its sketches were on matchboxes.
However, the military intervened. The main bases of the Soviet atomic submarine fleet were located in the North, and it was not at all necessary that trading caravans roamed around in these strategically important areas all year round. The project of "warming" Russia was closed.
sources
Previously, the borders of Europe were very different. Where the sea splashes today, there were pastures and forests, where people lived and birds hibernated. Global climatic processes threaten the population of Europe even today, causing floods and other natural disasters.
Today Europe is sounding the alarm: global warming, melting glaciers, rising sea levels are problems that will soon affect everyone. The famous Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy will disappear into sea waters, and warm air will increase turbulence over the Atlantic. However, serious climate change has drastically affected people's lives before. Remembering the hardships of the past, you need to learn from history.
The first alarm signal from nature sounded in Europe as early as 6500 BC - it was then that the global melting of glaciers began. eight thousand years ago British Isles were connected to the mainland by a land later named Doggerland by archaeologists - the land of fishermen.
Exploration of Doggerland began with prehistoric harpoons and ammunition found in 1931 by a fishing trawler. As it turned out, in ancient times, the sea level near Europe was 120 meters lower than today, thus, in the Mesolithic era, people lived in the territories where the modern English Channel and the North Sea are located.
Doggerland connected the territories of modern Great Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands. This area was a land covered with tundra, with lagoons and swamps, rich in birds and fish.
According to a popular theory, due to the melting of the glaciers, Doggerland was inundated by the North Sea, and Britain became cut off from the European mainland about 8,500 years ago. However, on the site of the former land of the fishermen, a small island remained, gradually sinking into the water. Another hypothesis suggests that Doggerland was flooded by a large-scale tsunami that arose due to landslides of underwater soil in Norway, the so-called Sturegga. One way or another, Britain became separated from the continent, both geographically and culturally, which led to the emergence of specific traditions and a different path of development.
A thousand years later, another large-scale flooding of Europe occurred - this time in the east. Around 5600 B.C. The Black Sea was in much more modest boundaries than it is now. According to the theory of American geologists Rayman and Pitman, the Black Sea was previously a freshwater lake, but then, due to earthquakes, the previously closed Mediterranean Sea connected with the Black Sea, which began to quickly fill with salty sea water. The level of the Black Sea rose by 140 meters - at the same time, the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov arose, and instead of the modern Bosphorus Strait, an endless giant waterfall was flowing, 200 times greater than Niagara in terms of water flow. Of course, the increase in the volume of the Black Sea by 1.5 times led to the immediate flooding of the huge coastal zone. It is possible that it was this event that served as the basis for the myth of the Flood that exists in many cultures. Some historians also connect Plato's story of Atlantis with the flooding of the Black Sea. In any case, the Black Sea flood caused a full-scale migration of peoples. Despite criticism of this theory, the famous marinologist Ballard in 2000 confirmed the guesses of geologists by exploring the ancient coastlines of the Black Sea. With the help of radiocarbon analysis of molluscs and the study of changes in sedimentary rocks and aquatic plant species, scientists came to the conclusion that about 7500 thousand years ago the Black Sea was absolutely fresh.
After the warming of the Roman era, a long winter comes to Europe, which scientists call the climatic pessimum of the era of the Great Migration. Beginning around the 3rd-4th century AD, the pessimum continued until the middle of the 8th. Winters became colder, the air humidity increased, and the growth of glaciers accelerated so much that even some previously perfect Roman roads were partially blocked. The general average annual temperature has decreased by 1.5 degrees relative to the present day. The gradual cooling of the pessimum led in 535-536 to the worldwide cold anomaly.
Cooling in 535-536. was the most significant in the last two thousand years. Due to the eruption of tropical volcanoes, the transparency of the atmosphere dropped sharply, which led to a sharp cooling. Here is what a medieval historian wrote: “And this year the greatest miracle happened: the whole year the sun emitted light like the moon, without rays, as if it was losing its strength, ceasing to shine, as before, purely and brightly. From the time this began, neither war, nor pestilence, nor any other calamity that brings death has ceased among people. At the same time, a plague epidemic began, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and the cold snap caused a chain reaction - the harvest decreased, famine began, the population of hungry regions began to migrate, which led to military clashes. After the events of 536, the weather in Europe did not improve overnight. In Italy, there were frequent floods, on the coast of the North Sea and in England, the sea flooded part of the land, in France, severe downpours and floods began. Hunger, humid climate and unusually cold winters lead to the spread of leprosy in Central Europe in the 8th-9th centuries. Due to a sharp change in climate and wars, the population of Europe is halved - from 20 to 10 million people. Famine and disease forced the inhabitants of cities and villages in the northern Alps to leave their homes, and new settlements, according to archaeological data, lost touch with the previous culture. Historians believe that it is to the pessimum that we owe such a historical phenomenon as the Great Migration of Nations. The rapid population growth in the era of Roman warming was replaced by a sharp cooling and forced peoples to look for new lands for settlement.
After the era of the migration of peoples in Europe in the 10th century, warming again sets in, lasting about three hundred years. However, at the beginning of the XIV century, the course of the warm Gulf Stream slows down, which leads to a real environmental disaster - unusually heavy rains begin, winters become severe, which leads to the freezing of gardens and the death of crops. Fruit trees have completely died out in England, Scotland, northern France and Germany. In Germany and Scotland, all vineyards were frozen, which led to the cessation of the tradition of winemaking. Snow began to fall in Italy, and severe frosts led to mass starvation. Medieval legends tell that in England of the XIV century, due to rains and storms, two mythical islands are completely hidden under water. In Russia, the cooling process was reflected in atypically rainy years.
Scientists tend to call this period, which lasted from the 14th to the 19th centuries, the Little Ice Age, since the average annual temperature at that time was the lowest in two thousand years. Despite the fact that temperatures began to rise at the end of the 14th century, the Ice Age did not end there. Snowfalls and frosts continued, although the famine associated with a small harvest had already ended. Snow-covered Central Europe became commonplace, and glaciers began to advance in Greenland, permafrost settled in the region. Some researchers attribute the slight warming characteristic of the 15th-16th centuries to the fact that the maximum solar Activity of that time compensated for the slowdown of the Gulf Stream by raising the average annual temperature.
However, the coldest time of the Little Ice Age was the third stage of cooling - solar activity decreased sharply, which led to the disappearance of the Vikings from Greenland, covering even the southern seas with ice. A sharp change in temperature allowed people to freely ride on the Thames, the Danube and the Moscow River. In Paris, Berlin and London, blizzards and snowfalls, blizzards and drifts have become commonplace. This period was the coldest in recent history Europe, but in the 19th century temperatures gradually began to rise, and today the world is in a phase of natural warming, in a state of exit from the Little Ice Age, as some researchers think. Therefore, it is not surprising that in many major cities Europe, for example, in Prague, there are unexpected floods, and the average annual temperature in the world is steadily rising. According to the theory of climatologists, a climatic optimum should soon follow, which will return the world to the climatic state of the 10th century.
The flood area is shown in blue.
Changes on the map of Europe will be almost the most rapid and dramatic. After the failure of the tectonic plate, the entire north of the mainland will go under water. In place of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, only a handful of islands will remain. Most of the UK from Scotland to the English Channel will also sink, and the kingdom with the remnants of London and Birmingham will be located on small islands resembling modern Scottish ones. Almost all of Ireland will disappear.
Almost all of Central Europe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea will go under water. From the whole of France there will be a small island with Paris in the center. Between him and Switzerland will lay a new waterway from Geneva to Zurich. A third of Spain, the western and southern parts of Portugal will disappear from the face of the earth.
Three-quarters of Italy will also go under water: Venice, Naples, Rome and Genoa will sink. New lands will appear from Sicily to Sardinia.
The Black Sea will flood Bulgaria and Romania. Part of western Turkey will disappear under water: a new coastline will stretch from Cyprus to Istanbul.
As for Russia, then Vladivostok, Magadan and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky will go to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The waves of the Baltic Sea will hide St. Petersburg, the Yamalo-Nenets will be completely flooded autonomous region and Salekhard. The West Siberian Plain will turn into a sea. The Azov and Black Seas will merge, a wide strait will connect them with the Caspian Sea, cutting off the Caucasus from Russia. The spilled waters of the Tsimlyansk reservoir will bury the Rostov, Astrakhan, Volgograd region and Stavropol.
Moreover, the lands remaining in Russia will be heavily swamped. For several years now, permafrost has been melting in the country. According to Professor Gennady Belchansky, head of the laboratory for space monitoring of Arctic ecosystems at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution named after A. A.N. Severtsov, the temperature of permafrost annually rises by half a degree, and in a few decades the permafrost will turn into a swamp, into which the buildings built there will collapse.
Becomes unusable winter roads- which means everything northern regions Russia will be cut off from big land because there are no other roads in these parts. In fact, the population of the northern cities will be left to the mercy of fate.
It will not be better for the indigenous peoples of the North. The sharply increased level of ultraviolet radiation will make it impossible for people to live near the Arctic Circle. Warming in the Arctic will negatively affect local flora and fauna. Scientists warn that polar bears, seals and other inhabitants of the icy expanses will not be able to adapt to new conditions and will die out. impoverishment natural resources will deprive the Chukchi, Koryaks and other indigenous peoples of the North of the opportunity to engage in traditional crafts. By the end of the 21st century, they will simply disappear from the face of the Earth.
Moreover, the polar ice caps act as a mirror - they reflect part of the sun rays back to space. If they disappear, all the heat received from the Sun will remain on the Earth. The rate of global warming will increase exponentially. According to specialists from the Institute of Computational Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, by 2100 the average annual temperature will increase by 3 degrees. The strongest (by 4-6 degrees) the air will warm up in the temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, while over the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere - by only 2-3 degrees.
In the report “The impact of global warming on the climate in Europe”, the European Agency for environment warns that by 2050 the average annual temperature in the EU will rise by 2-6 degrees. The largest temperature jump is expected in Spain, Italy and Greece. In Northern Europe, warming will be less noticeable. In practice, this means that winters will become warm and snowless, while summers will be unusually hot and dry. Only sometimes the heat of 40 degrees or more will be interrupted by heavy rains and thunderstorms, contributing to floods.
Global warming will not bypass Russia. Specialists from Moscow State University, the Center for Problems of Ecology and Forest Productivity of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Kassel (Germany) believe that end of XXI century, the average annual temperature in Russia will increase by 4-6 degrees. Here, warming will affect mainly the northern regions. In the south, the temperature will rise by only 1 degree, but this will be enough for a drought to come here.