{"id":173754,"date":"2025-10-01T22:31:17","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T22:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/twenty-four-years-ago-the-earth-was-symmetrical-now-the-northern-hemisphere-is-clearly-darker-than-the-southern-hemisphere\/"},"modified":"2025-10-01T22:31:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T22:31:18","slug":"twenty-four-years-ago-the-earth-was-symmetrical-now-the-northern-hemisphere-is-clearly-darker-than-the-southern-hemisphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/twenty-four-years-ago-the-earth-was-symmetrical-now-the-northern-hemisphere-is-clearly-darker-than-the-southern-hemisphere\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty-four years ago, the Earth was symmetrical. Now, the northern hemisphere is “clearly” darker than the southern hemisphere."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Navigating Earth’s Unbalanced Reflection: A Study of Satellite Data<\/h2>\n

NASA’s last 24 years of \u00a0satellite data\u00a0 reveal an “unequivocal” trend: the earth has lost its balance, and now the \u00a0northern hemisphere\u00a0 reflects \u00a0less light\u00a0 than the \u00a0southern hemisphere\u00a0.<\/p>\n

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How is that?<\/strong> Until a few years ago, our planet maintained an almost perfect symmetry regarding its \u00a0albedo\u00a0: its reflectivity from the perspective of an observer in the earth’s orbit.<\/p>\n

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Despite its obvious differences (the north dominated by \u00a0terrestrial masses\u00a0 and the south by \u00a0oceans\u00a0), both hemispheres reflected practically the same amount of \u00a0sunlight\u00a0 to outer space. Now that doesn’t happen anymore. The \u00a0northern hemisphere\u00a0 is absorbing more solar energy than the southern hemisphere, breaking the balance that had been maintained for a long time.<\/p>\n

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In figures.<\/strong> The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>, quantifies this divergence at \u00a00.34 W\/m\u00b2 per decade\u00a0. It is a \u00a0statistically significant\u00a0 value that points to a deep change in the \u00a0energy engine\u00a0 of our planet.<\/p>\n

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And why?<\/strong> The study, led by Norman Loeb from the \u00a0NASA Langley Research Center\u00a0, points to a combination of factors. The first one, somewhat paradoxical, is that the main engine of the growing asymmetry is \u00a0aerosols\u00a0, the tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere against which we have been fighting for some time.<\/p>\n

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Thanks to \u00a0environmental protection measures\u00a0, fine particle pollution has decreased significantly in \u00a0Europe\u00a0, the \u00a0United States\u00a0, and \u00a0China\u00a0 in recent years. Less contamination means cleaner air, and therefore fewer particles that reflect sunlight. The result is that more radiation reaches the surface and is absorbed.<\/p>\n

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In the \u00a0southern hemisphere\u00a0, the situation has occurred just the opposite. Mass events, such as the \u00a0Australian wildfires\u00a0 of 2019-2020 or the eruption of the \u00a0Hunga Tonga volcano\u00a0 in 2022, injected enormous amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere, temporarily increasing its reflectivity.<\/p>\n

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There is something else.<\/strong> To the aerosols, we must also add changes in the \u00a0albedo\u00a0 of the surface itself. The northern hemisphere is losing \u00a0snow\u00a0 and \u00a0sea ice\u00a0 rapidly due to global warming. If white and bright surfaces (which reflect light) are replaced by water and dark terrain (which absorb light), the hemisphere becomes increasingly darkened.<\/p>\n

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Clouds are missing.<\/strong> What has most bewildered scientists is the \u00a0role of clouds\u00a0. For a long time, it was theorized that clouds would act as a natural compensatory mechanism for this phenomenon. If a hemisphere darkened due to external factors, atmospheric circulation would adjust cloudiness to reflect more light and restore balance.<\/p>\n

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However, the data shows that this is not what is happening. The study concludes that the contribution of clouds to the difference in reflectivity between hemispheres is surprisingly small. The reason is complex: it seems that the changes in the clouds of the tropics are being canceled out by the changes at higher latitudes, questioning one of the foundational hypotheses on the self-regulation of the earth’s climate.<\/p>\n

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A problem.<\/strong> That one hemisphere absorbs more heat than the other is not simply an academic curiosity. The \u00a0Earth’s energy balance\u00a0 is the engine that drives both atmospheric and oceanic circulation; in essence, it influences our \u00a0climate\u00a0 and \u00a0weather patterns\u00a0. This imbalance is already having critical consequences.<\/p>\n

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The \u00a0northern hemisphere\u00a0 not only heats up faster than the south, but it is also witnessing an increase in rainfall in tropical latitudes. If the \u00a0intertropical convergence zone\u00a0, a significant rain belt, moves northward, the repercussions will be severe for billions of people.<\/p>\n

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Image | NASA, GOES<\/p>\n

In Xataka | The rains are not always good news. In the Arctic, for example, they begin to become alarming.<\/p>\n


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General News – 2<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Navigating Earth’s Unbalanced Reflection: A Study of Satellite Data NASA’s last 24 years of \u00a0satellite data\u00a0 reveal an “unequivocal” trend: the earth has lost its balance, and now the \u00a0northern hemisphere\u00a0 reflects \u00a0less light\u00a0 than the \u00a0southern hemisphere\u00a0. How is that? Until a few years ago, our planet maintained an almost perfect symmetry regarding its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":173755,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36399],"tags":[19615,5142,29168,3436,3227,43061,32744,45],"class_list":["post-173754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-darker","tag-earth","tag-hemisphere","tag-northern","tag-southern","tag-symmetrical","tag-twentyfour","tag-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}