Scientists from Rutgers University in New Jersey conducted simulations showing how the climate will react in the event of a full-scale nuclear war between Russia and the United States. It also compared the latest results with earlier post-nuclear climate models that were created in 2007 by NASA's Goddard Space Research Institute.
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-nuclear-war-russia-result-winter.html
According to the results of research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, both of these models predict that in the event of a nuclear war between Russia and the US, the world would be plunged into a ten-year nuclear winter. In addition, fires caused by the explosions could release up to 147 million tons of soot into the atmosphere.
Streams in the stratosphere would create vortices of dust that would circle the globe in just a few weeks. Then a cloud of soot, blocking sunlight, would cause the average surface temperature to drop by almost 10 degrees Celsius. According to experts, it would take as long as 7 years for the soot veil to disappear, and three more years for the light reaching the Earth to return to normal.
Due to the atmospheric factors, the war would lead to the collapse of the monsoons and would cause huge changes to the El Niño cycle. The new data generally confirms predictions of less complex models from the past, such as those made in 1980. However, according to the new findings, the soot cloud that cuts off sunlight will disappear faster than predicted by the old NASA model, although the overall climate response remains the same.
According to scientists, it is imperative that the nuclear powers be fully aware of the climatic consequences of nuclear war. Simply put, a full-scale nuclear attack would be suicide not only for the countries that decided to launch it. It would be a global cataclysm.
Meanwhile, both Washington and Moscow recently denounced the medium-range non-proliferation treaty, in force since 1987, and the world is the closest to a possible nuclear conflict in many decades.
We live in troubled times. The vision of a nuclear war is still real, and tensions between Russia and the rest of the world are stronger than ever before. Scientists conducted simulations showing how even a small nuclear war would negatively affect the entire planet.
For many years, experts predicted that the specter of a nuclear war would hang over our heads as a result of the conflict between Pakistan and India, e.g. over the disputed region of Kashmir. Just one spark would be enough, as a terrorist attack by one of the government institutions, which would not go unanswered. The conflict could escalate extremely quickly, ending with the detonation of several small atomic bombs, killing tens of millions of people. This could be the beginning of the end for all mankind.
Smoke from burnt cities would rise into the atmosphere, enveloping our planet in a blanket of soot that blocks the sun's rays. Global temperatures would drop, leading to an agricultural imbalance - from California to China. Some goods would become highly scarce, such as coffee. Hunger would dominate the world.
Such a gloomy vision was described several months ago in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00794-y) when no one was thinking about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine (except maybe Putin himself). Scientists decided to check how nuclear war would change the world we live in. The conclusions are based on long-term analyzes of the so-called nuclear winter, i.e. a serious global cooling that would occur after a great nuclear war, e.g. after the dropping of thousands of atomic bombs. It turns out, however, that also smaller nuclear conflicts - not necessarily global - can also have devastating effects on nature. A nuclear winter would not only destroy world agriculture but also alter the chemistry of the oceans, decimating the population of corals and other marine ecosystems.
As the United States and the Soviet Union stockpiled dozens of nuclear warheads (during the Cold War), experts simulated a possible nuclear war in preparation for the final attack. In the 1980s, many predictions were made, with the help of Carl Sagan himself (the famous astronomer and popularizer of science). Models indicated that smoke from burnt cities would block sunlight and plunge our planet into years of frost. Subsequent research softened these forecasts somewhat, pointing to a slightly less dramatic cooling. Nevertheless, the leader of the Soviet Union - Mikhail Gorbachev - mentioned nuclear winter as one of the factors that prompted him to take steps to denuclearize the country. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world's nuclear weapons stockpiles began to decline.
There are nine nations with nuclear weapons in their arsenal, so the specter of a nuclear winter still exists. This also applies to the possible outbreak of the Indo-Pakistani war. Both countries have around 150 nuclear warheads and are heavily involved in the conflict in the disputed Kashmir region. They are also considered by experts to be "incalculable" - it is worth adding that Russia is not considered to be such. Despite the brutal attacks in Ukraine and the nuclear scare by Vladimir Putin, the risk of a nuclear conflict initiated by Russia is still lower than the nuclear repercussions of the Kashmir war.
In 1998, Brian Toon, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has researched nuclear winter for decades (he was Sagan's student), contemplated a scenario where these countries fired 100 atomic bombs the size of those dropped on Hiroshima that kills 21 million people. He teamed up with Alan Robock of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, who specializes in the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions in a climate that is in many ways similar to a hypothetical nuclear winter. Thanks to the simulations carried out, it became clear that even a local nuclear war is a threat to the whole world.
In 2017, Toon and Robock received a grant of nearly $ 3 million from the Open Philanthropy Project, which supports research into the risk of a global catastrophe. The project aimed to analyze each stage of nuclear winter, from the initial 'firestorm' and spreading smoke, to the long-term effects on agriculture and the economy.
Several scenarios were analyzed, including one involving the US-Russian war involving most of the world's nuclear arsenal, which would throw 150 million tons of soot into the atmosphere. The vision of the Indian-Pakistani conflict was also analyzed with the use of 100 warheads, which would generate 5 million tons of soot. It turns out that soot is a key factor influencing the extent of nuclear winter. Three years after the bomb explosion, global temperatures would drop by more than 10oC (in the first scenario of world war), but in the event of a local conflict (Pakistan vs. India) only by slightly more than 1oC.
The researchers used data collected from the 2017 great fires in British Columbia, Canada, to estimate how high up the atmosphere would smoke from burning cities. The same phenomenon could occur after the nuclear war, because - apart from radioactive fallout - it was the soot from the flames that would be the greatest threat to our planet.
Comparisons with giant fires can also help resolve the controversy over the magnitude of the potential impact. A team from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico conducted their own simulations of the climate impact of 100 bombs in India and Pakistan the size of those dropped on Hiroshima. The researchers found that far less smoke would have leaked into the upper atmosphere than the Toon and Robock studies found. The climate would change slightly and there would be no nuclear winter.
It should also be remembered that a nuclear war would also negatively affect the oceans. It turns out that in the 1-2 years following a nuclear war, global cooling would affect the oceans' ability to absorb carbon, causing their pH to rise rapidly. This is the reverse of what we see today as the oceans absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide (the waters become acidic).
Scientists also looked at what would happen to aragonite, a mineral in seawater that marine organisms need to build their shells. In 2-5 years after the nuclear war, there would be less aragonite in the dark oceans, which would pose a threat to the organisms living there. In the simulations, the greatest changes in aragonite content took place in regions with coral reefs, namely the Southwest Pacific and the Caribbean Sea. This means that coral reef ecosystems (which are currently not healthy anyway) will face a nuclear war disaster.
The simulations for a potential nuclear war are not clear-cut. Nature would certainly suffer, but would humanity survive? Hopefully, that's a question we won't have to answer.
Many of us visit an atomic bomb explosion simulator. The traffic on the site is so high that the servers don't make it. After several decades of peace, the world is again afraid of nuclear warheads.
I never thought that I would live to see such times. Meanwhile, in reaction to what is happening in the world, the real siege is experienced by the simulator site, which calculates the zones of possible radioactive contamination after the explosion of an atomic bomb.
Until a few years ago, people who were born in the eighties or nineties could complain that they were born in terribly boring times. The time of wars has long gone into oblivion, conflicts, revolutions, and social upheavals have also been only history for years, and the world has turned into a more or less peaceful world of prosperity, where the most emotions are provided by cinema and the Internet.
It could even seem that if in the 21st century there was a serious international conflict, it would not take place on a real battlefield, but rather it would be a cyber conflict focusing on IT infrastructure, or it could be a conflict played with unmanned drones attacking the infrastructure energy. Few, however, thought that nowadays a conflict played with the help of tanks, artillery, mortars, and rockets is still possible.
The world once again turned out to be unpredictable, and it was just such a conflict that began right on our borders. Moreover, this conflict also uses the threat of a nuclear war, which could result in the loss of life in the millions. Russia openly threatens all Western countries with a nuclear conflict if NATO becomes involved in the conflict by helping Ukraine.
For the first time since the Cold War, there is a risk of a nuclear conflict. No wonder then that one of the oldest websites where you can calculate radioactive contamination zones in the event of an atomic bomb explosion in the last few days is undergoing a real siege.
On the Nukemap portal, an atomic bomb explosion simulator, you can check the radius of destruction, the potential loss of lives, and the effects of a nuclear missile explosion at a given location. At a time when Vladimir Putin is threatening the nuclear stick and intelligence reports that Russia has 1,600 nuclear warheads ready for launch, everyone wants to see if they are far enough away from the potential target of a nuclear attack.
As the creator of the website, Alex Wellerstein, argues in an interview with the Atlantic portal, usually about 20,000 people a day used an atomic bomb explosion simulator. The last ten days have been about 150,000 visits a day, the number being due to the limited capabilities of the server. It is possible that now - after optimization - even more people will visit the site. Just in case, Wellerstein tweeted an alternate address, which also uses Nukemap.
One thing is certain: the growing interest in the site indicates growing public concern about a potential nuclear attack, something that we have not dealt with for several decades. And for this you can only thank Vladimir Putin, best of all by cutting himself off from all the products made in Russia and supporting the Ukrainians who were forced by him to flee their country.
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