According to University of Maryland’s Professor Raghu
Murtugudde, the astronomical pollution levels in the highly populated region of
Southeast Asia pose a serious threat to the area’s annual monsoons. Historically, the monsoons have lasted about
four months each, beginning around June 1 and ending around October 3. As a lifeline for South Asia’s population of
roughly two billion, the monsoon proves vital for inhabitants’ sustenance and
cultivation of crops. Over the past
century, however, the annual phenomenon has become less beneficial to the
region as the total amount of rainfall had decreased by approximately 20
percent. Murtugudde suggests that the
onset of this transition is the region’s rapidly increasing pollution, which
causes the continent to heat faster so that the heat contrast between the
continent and the Indian Ocean has diminished, causing a significant amount of
evaporated ocean water to simply pour back into the sea.
It seems that the only solution to this burgeoning problem
is to completely obliterate the region’s pollution for decades, which would
prove completely implausible. It seems
to me that the population only continues to expand while the South Asian
landmass simply cannot sustain any more human development.
http://www.livescience.com/51520-dust-is-changing-timing-of-monsoons.html
No comments:
Post a Comment