For instance, when dust from the Andes of South America lands in northern and sub-Saharan Africa, it can bring with it nutrients needed for rainforest growth in the Amazon Basin. This wind-swept dust can also have positive impacts. These toxins harm marine species, and eventually via the food chain, humans. These accumulations of microscopic algae can be beneficial in some ways, but can also be responsible for toxins that accumulate in ocean ecosystems. This is important because there is evidence that when particles land in the ocean, it encourages the growth of phytoplankton blooms. The data it collects from the ISS, scientists say, can be used to analyze the impact that dust carried by winds has on the ecosystems in which it lands. Measuring ecosystem impactsĮMIT will have a scientific impact in fields beyond climate, too. "We'll take the new maps and put them into our climate models, and from that, we'll know what fraction of aerosols are absorbing heat versus reflecting to a much greater extent than we have known in the past," Natalie Mahowald, a scientist at Cornell University scientist EMIT's deputy principal investigator, said in the statement. Data like this has been available to scientists before, but it came from only around 5,000 sites EMIT offers billions of samples and in much greater detail. This will aid in determining their colors and whether they are reflecting or absorbing light more strongly. Through investigations like this, EMIT will give scientists an idea of how dust particles travel around Earth's atmosphere, where they come from, and in what amounts. In addition to creating detailed maps of the surface composition of these chosen regions, EMIT has also been able to detect plumes of greenhouse gases, like methane and carbon dioxide, that emerge from Earth-based regions like landfills, oil facilities and other human-made infrastructure. Composed of billions of measurements, these include "scenes" of a 6,900-mile-wide (11,000-kilometer-wide) belt across our planet's midsection that hosts dusty, arid regions. In fact, it can even dissect some regions that wouldn’t even be accessible to instruments carried by aircraft - all while delivering the same kind of detail possible with close-quarters, Earth-based investigations.ĭuring its approximately 17 months of operation, EMIT captured around 55,000 50-by-50-mile (80-by-80-kilometer) images of Earth across a targeted area of study. 'Big picture' climate scienceĮMIT's low-Earth orbit vantage point lets the system analyze areas of our planet that ground-based geologists wouldn’t have a chance of reaching. Since August of that year, the spectrometer has been studying Earth's surface from an altitude of around about 250 miles (410 kilometers). EMIT was developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and reached the ISS in 2022.
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