The destructive megasukha is spreading around the world

(Bloomberg) – The condition of severe drought has helped to incite the wildfire of Los Angeles. But a new study released on Thursday in Science Journal comes with a warning: climate change is making the destructive, multi -year “megasukha” worse worldwide.

Drought is relative – for example, in general, dry climates like drought, Phoenix, Arizona in general can be recorded as an unusual wet duration. But they can disorganize the ecosystem, sometimes in dangerous ways.

“We are looking at this in California right now,” said Durk Nicholas Kargar, a senior researcher and a paper writer at Swiss Federal Institute WSL. “Over time, the vegetation dries up, and we have increased the frequency of the fire, and the house burns. In other areas, we will find agricultural failures. ”

The fire in California seems to be due to only eight months due to low rainfall. While climate change is contributing to more irregular rainfall in western America, the new paper takes a global approach to previous years. Researchers were motivated to do so when Kargar and co-author Franceska Pelisioti spent time in Chile, which is between droughts that started in 2010.

“The results were disastrous from ecosystem to agriculture,” said Professor Pelisioti, Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Drought has caused intermittent water scarcity including the country’s capital Santiago, as well as mining, which is a major part of Chile’s economy. In 2021 and 2022, London -based Chile -based multinational company Antofgasta said that drought was forced to cut production. In September, Google said it was stopping the plan to create a large data center due to the water problem.

To find out how many other places have experienced similar megasukhe, researchers saw rain and vegetation data. He also saw spatial data to see how many areas the drought had affected.

He found that in the last 40 years, there has been a heavy drought on every continent except Antarctica. Mongolia, southeastern Australia and Western America were among the highest density areas of serious multi-year-old phenomena. However, the longest drought in his research was in the eastern Congo basin which lasted for a decade. It covered 576,924 sq mile (1,494,226 km sq), which is about twice the Texas -shaped area.

Researchers also found that climate change is increasing in areas facing multi-year drought.

“The extent to which the dry field is increasing every year every year is roughly equal to the size of Switzerland,” said Liangzhi Chen, postdorctor of Swiss Federal Institute WSL and lead writer of the study.

As megadrots expand their reach, they are also able to harm them. The drought inspires five times more people to migrate compared to floods around the world. According to the World Bank analysis, the dry weather is responsible for a fall of more than half a percent in average gross domestic product in low and medium -income countries. And as the climate will heat up, the problem is likely to be worse.

(The first paragraph does “science” by correcting the name of the journal from “nature”.)

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