A school project became more educational than expected after students discovered something unusual in the Arctic.
What's happening?
According to Live Science, schoolchildren in Russia were using satellite imagery to explore the Arctic region when they noticed something strange upon comparing images taken years apart.
They noticed that Mesyatsev Island, located off the coast of Eva-Liv Island, had completely vanished. Made up of ice and grit, the floating island covered 11.1 million square meters in 2010.
However, the satellite images showed the island had shrunk to just 30,000 square meters by August 2024, representing a 99.7% reduction of its surface area. More recent images, taken in September, showed it had disappeared entirely.
Why is Mesyatsev Island's disappearance concerning?
Alexey Kucheiko, a researcher at the Moscow Aviation Institute — which led the schoolchildren's project — said in a statement that the island's disappearance was likely caused by rising global temperatures as a result of human-caused planetary warming.
While the island had been steadily melting since breaking from Eva-Liv Island sometime before 1985, the rapid rate of its declining mass in the span of little over a decade is troubling. While it perhaps clung on to existence for a little longer than expected, scientists gave up studying the island in 2022 because they anticipated it would disappear imminently.
Mesyatsev Island was once a nesting site for walruses, but after it separated from Eva-Liv Island, breeding activity had to move elsewhere. The consequences of this quick change in geographical composition demonstrate the knock-on effects that warming temperatures can have on biodiversity and local ecosystems.
What can be done to slow the rate of warming temperatures?
It may seem like an insurmountable task, especially when done alone, but responsible life choices can make a difference when trying to combat increasing global temperatures — especially if we can convince friends and family to do the same.
For example, ditching your gas-guzzling car in favor of a bike can significantly reduce your personal production of planet-warming pollution — and save you money in the process. In fact, one study cited by People for Bikes noted that if 10% of the population swapped one car journey for a bike ride a week, there would be an associated drop of 10% in transport-related carbon emissions.
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