Earlier this week, we spoke with Planetary Science Institutes’s Dr. Dan Berman about how a covering of dust can help preserve glaciers, particularly on Mars. It turns out that, on Earth at least, glaciers can also protect us from that same dust.

In new research presented at AGU’s Fall Meeting, scientists collected airborne dust that was released into the atmosphere after the swift melting of a glacier in northern Canada. The glacier melted so quickly that it changed the course of the nearby Slims River. The river’s previous bed dried out, and all the fine particulates that had been in the water were now airborne.

The goal of the study was to gain an understanding of how aerosols impact both local air quality and global climate patterns. As more and more glaciers melt away with terrifying haste, more and more of this dust will be released into the atmosphere.

The results were… not good. The dust was incredibly fine, even finer than dust found in the global dust belt containing places like the Sahara and Gobi. When the wind blew, the air quality exceeded acceptable levels set by the World Health Organization and became a public health hazard. Even worse, a sandblasting effect from larger airborne particles caused more fragile arsenic-containing particles to break down into very fine dust, which also became airborne.

And if that weren’t enough, all of that dust being released into the atmosphere is now free to create dust clouds. Researchers aren’t entirely sure just what effect those clouds will have on global temperatures, and more research is needed. The team is hoping to return to their far-northern collection sites and conduct a further investigation into just how the dust interacts with water clouds and how it scatters and absorbs sunlight. Both of these processes could have a wider impact on the climate.

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