After the war between Russia and Ukraine, the threat of nuclear war came to the fore again. How does the explosion of nuclear weapons affect our planet today? A new research study published recently revealed rather surprising results about the global impact of a possible nuclear war.
Cheryl Harrison, an assistant professor in the LSU Department of Ocean and Coastal Sciences, lead author of the study, and other authors conducted a possible regional and larger-scale nuclear warfare experiment with multiple computer simulations to examine the capabilities of today’s state-of-the-art nuclear weapons and their impact on Earth. Nine countries worldwide currently possess more than 13,000 nuclear weapons, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
There may be a great famine in the world.
In all the scenarios scientists have tried, nuclear firestorms release soot and smoke into the upper atmosphere. As a result, the Sun is blocked and everything in the world is corrupted. In the first month after the nuclear explosion took place, the global temperature drops by about 7 degrees Celsius.
Stating that it doesn’t matter where the war started, Harrison said, “When nuclear smoke is released into the atmosphere, it spreads globally and affects the whole world.” Even after the resulting smog has dissipated, ocean temperatures are dropping rapidly and are unable to return to their pre-war state. As our planet cools, sea ice is spreading over more than 9 square kilometers. Countries in the Northern Hemisphere and some cities such as Shanghai are bringing the trade of food and supplies to a halt due to the expanding ice mass.
Particularly from the Arctic to the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans, the sudden drop in light and ocean temperatures will kill seaweed, the foundation of the marine food web, and essentially create a famine in the ocean. As a result, all production areas related to the sea, especially fishing and aquaculture, will cease.
It will take hundreds of years for the seas and oceans to recover.
The oceans take longer to recover from a possible nuclear war than land, according to the study. In the worst-case scenario, the oceans will likely take decades to recover on the surface and hundreds of years in depth, while changes in Arctic sea ice will likely take thousands of years. At the same time, the “Nuclear Little Ice Age” will effectively take place. The researchers shared that marine ecosystems will be drastically disrupted in both the initial disruption and new ocean state, resulting in long-term, global impacts to ecosystem services such as fisheries.
The research team believes that this new study will encourage more countries to sign treaties banning the use of nuclear weapons. This study demonstrates that Earth’s systems are globally interconnected, whether they are caused specifically by volcanic eruptions, massive forest fires or war.
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