Ask Erik: Episode Twenty-Seven

Here at Ask Erik, we've spent a lot of time reading books and comics, watching movies, and browsing through the Internet in the hopes of finding the answers to life's biggest mysteries. When Apple announces it has $140 billion stashed away, at what point does it stop being real money?  Is there a permanent divide between people from the opposite coasts?  If you ate a bunch of Japanese beetles, would you get hungry again in an hour?

Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile).  Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.



To Erik:  Remember that ozone hole?  Whatever happened with that, and why should we even care about Antarctica anyway?

Sometimes the timing of a question just lines up perfectly with something I'm already learning about, and this is one such case.

So, there's good news and bad news about that hole in the ozone layer that terrified everybody towards the end of the 90s and the start of the 2000s.  The bad news is it still exists, the good news is it shrank considerably in 2012.  Now, this doesn't mean it's going away.  In fact, it tends to fluctuate in size every year, so this year it could grow significantly.

But why should we care if Antarctica gets a little warmer?  Nobody lives there, and maybe the penguins would appreciate a chance to get out of temperatures that could go as low as -128 degrees Fahrenheit.

Well, perhaps they might.  However, there's a problem with that.  You see, everything on Earth is connected.   The nutrients that nourish the South American rain forests are blown there from Africa.  Hurricanes that crash into the southeastern United States start out in the south Atlantic.  And our oceans and tides are massively influenced by Antarctica and the seasons it undergoes.

Here's a fun fact.  During its "summer" Antarctica is about one and a half times the size of the United States.  During the winter, it's as big as the entire continent of Africa.  That massive increase in size comes from all the water that freezes around the continent.  When ice crystals form, they expel salt, which takes some of the surrounding water and turns it into brine.  Brine, you might remember from science class (or Finding Nemo) is where lots of teeny, tiny life forms find nourishment, and then other creatures eat those, and the circle of life begins.

So, great, we've got all this brine in Antarctica, but what happens to it?  Well, it's heavier than normal water, so it sinks down and forms massive underwater waterfalls.  This brine then flows out along the grooves and paths carved into the ocean floor around the world, where it winds up feeding every other ocean and essentially providing life to the rest of the planet.

How much are we talking?  Well, several million tons of ice forms in the northwestern sea (the Weddell Sea) alone, creating several trillion tons of brine.  When it descends into a two-mile long chasm just outside of Antarctica, the amount of brine flowing into that massive waterfall is about a trillion gallons of brine per hour, equivalent to five hundred Niagara Falls.  That's a lot of brine.

So, if the hole in the ozone gets bigger and the temperature around Antarctica goes up (which can only really happen if weather patterns change because of the massive storm system that surrounds Antarctica, but that's another article), we could end up with less ice, which means less brine, which means fewer things that feed on brine, which starts going up the food chain rather dramatically.

And that's ignoring the fact that Antarctica acts as a major cooling force for the world.  That brine that flows out is the densest, coldest water that exists naturally on the planet, which in turns cools the oceans it flows into.

There's a lot more science involved, but I recommend people go to the PBS series Nova's homepage, and watch their special about the stuff we've learned once we started looking at the Earth from space.  It's really eye-opening, and makes you realize just how important something as minor as cleaning up a park or reducing pollution in a major city can change things halfway across the world.