Australia wildfires' smoke turn New Zealand glaciers brown
Aside from affecting the glaciers' colour, scientists say the coating of ash from the smoke is likely to speed up their melting process.
Australia's wildfire crisis has been devastating for the country, and its effects have reached beyond the country's shores to New Zealand.
Winds have blown the smoke some 2,000 km across the Tasman Sea, causing some communities to experience a visible haze this week.
But though some of that smoke has dispersed, they've left a fine coating of ash on some of the New Zealand's glaciers, potentially increasing their melting at a time when glaciers are already in decline worldwide due to climate change.
The Fox and Franz Josef glaciers near the South Island's west coast had something of a brownish tinge to them this week, and photos posted to social media by an Australian woman living in New Zealand's capital, Wellington.
"We took a flight up over Fox and Franz Josef glaciers ... and landed on a flat surface not too far from the glaciers, not on a glacier per se. The pilot said he had been up the day before and the snow was white," the poster, known as Rachel or Rey and who declined to give her full name, told CNN this week.
Image: Social media via Reuters.
That's bad news for glaciers. Their typical white hue usually reflects most of the sun's energy back outward, limiting the rate at which they melt. With the coating of ash, more of the sun's energy is absorbed, hastening the melting process.
Andrew Mackintosh, a professor at the School of Earth Atmosphere and Environment at Australia's Monash University in Melbourne, told the Guardian the ash from Australia's wildfires could increase this season's glacier melt by 20-30 per cent, though he noted that this was only an estimate.
“It is quite common for dust to be transported to New Zealand glaciers, but I would say that the amount of transport right now is pretty phenomenal – I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it,” Mackintosh told the newspaper. “It is concerning to me to see so much material being deposited on the glaciers.”
Image: Social media via Reuters.
New Zealand has some 3,000 glaciers, and the Australian says many of them have lost about 33 per cent of their extent since the 1970s, with some expected to vanish altogether this century.
In Australia, eight people have been killed and another 18 were listed as missing this week (as of Thursday), with more than a thousand homes destroyed in the past few weeks. Thousands of people have been evacuated, with some in hard-hit coastal towns forced to take refuge on the beaches.
Some 5 million hectares of land have burned in the country this wildfire season, an area about the size of Nova Scotia.