The sea of plastic

Since the 1980s, Almería in southern Spain has developed the largest concentration of greenhouses in the world, covering 26,000 hectares. The greenhouses reflect so much sunlight back into the atmosphere that they are actually cooling the province, Spanish researchers have found. While temperatures in the rest of Spain have climbed at rates above the world average, meteorological observatories located in the so-called sea of plastic have shown them moving in the opposite direction, with a decline of 0.3 degrees per decade. The strange phenomenon had not gone unnoticed in scientific circles, and now a study has suggested a plausible explanation: the white colour of the plastic reflects sunlight into the atmosphere as if it were a mirror, and it slows the warming of the surface. In this way, the greenhouses at a local level offset the rising temperatures associated with global warming.

About arnulfo

veterano del ciberespacio
This entry was posted in Γαῖα and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s