Antarctica is a stardust wonderland. There, amid the pristine whiteness of ice and snow, scientists found more than 48,000 meteors that had fallen to Earth over perhaps millions of years. But the reservoir will not exist forever. New analysis shows that rising temperatures are making the ice softer, causing meteorites to sink deeper than we can reach.

We may lose around 5,000 meteors per year in the coming years; The Solar System archive and potentially interstellar space will be lost forever.

Meteors represent an unprecedented resource for studying our little corner of the Milky Way. They are formed from the remnants of an asteroid formed in the early solar system, or from fragments of another planet or our own moon that bounced off and flew towards us. Some even contain interstellar material that formed entirely before the solar system.

In addition to the thousands of tons of cosmic dust that constantly rain down from the sky, these rock fragments also fall to Earth with a certain regularity. They’re no more likely to end up in Antarctica than anywhere else, but the relatively obscure, frozen wasteland makes an ideal hunting ground.

There, the contrast between dark rock fragments and white ice greatly facilitates the search for meteorites. Also, there aren’t many Earth rocks on the ice, so if you find one it probably came from space. Finally, the cold, dry desert means meteorites are better preserved in Antarctica; so even if a meteorite has been there for a while, it will probably be in good condition.

Since the meteorites most likely sat intact in Antarctica, the objects found there do not form small databases that could tell us about other worlds or the early solar system. They can help scientists determine the speed at which meteorites hit our Earth; This is extremely important when it comes to protecting the Earth from potentially dangerous impacts.

Scientists retrieve an average of 1,000 meteors from Antarctica each year. Recently, a team of scientists led by glaciologists Veronika Tollenaar of the Free University of Brussels and Harry Zecollari of ETH Zurich mapped where these rocks are most likely to be found and how many to expect, and found that between 300,000 and 850,000 meteorites may have scattered across the Earth. continents, most of which have been frozen for up to a million years.

Now researchers have taken their work even further with new estimates of how long these meteors will stick around and wait to be collected. The forecast is disappointing.

Based on previous research, we know that the concentration of meteorites in Antarctica is incredibly sensitive to temperature. The team’s previous research had shown that almost no meteorites were found with surface temperatures above -9 degrees Celsius (15.8 Fahrenheit), even for short periods of time. Simulations also showed that meteorites could sink into ice at temperatures above -10 degrees Celsius (14 Fahrenheit).

The researchers used a machine learning algorithm to quantify how many meteorites would disappear under the ice as temperatures rise at current and projected warming rates. They found that even at moderate warming rates, we would lose thousands of meteorites per year.

Under current emissions policy, which assumes 2.7°C of warming compared to pre-industrial levels, Antarctica could lose 28 to 30 percent of its asteroids by 2050. In some regions, this number can be as high as 50 percent; and under higher emissions scenarios of 5.2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, up to 76 percent of Antarctic meteorites would be buried under ice in the coming decades.

“The ongoing loss of Antarctic meteorites is a consequence of climate change,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

“Rapid and targeted collection of all meteorites is necessary to preserve the information about our Solar System that each additional sample contains: for example, information about the origin of life on Earth through the diffusion of water and organic matter and how the Moon was formed.” . A joint effort would be similar in spirit to what is currently being done in ice core research; In this research, ice samples collected from unique glaciers, such as the few vanished but remaining tropical glaciers, are stored in long-term archives.

“But ultimately, the only way to preserve the remains of undiscovered Antarctic meteorites is to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”