2023-06-26 16:00:00
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Approximately 66 million years ago, three quarters of all species that inhabited the Earth disappeared when an asteroid 10 to 15 kilometers in diameter called Chicxulub traveling at 72,000 kilometers per hour crashed into our planet in what is now the Gulf of Mexico.
However, after such an impact, the worst would only be yet to come. Thus, the Chicxulub collision caused millions of tons of sulfates and soot to rise into the atmosphere, preventing sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface. As an indirect consequence, the Earth cooled, the climate changed and primary productivity collapsed. And while the most well-known victims of the asteroid impact were the dinosaurs, the resulting food shortages affected the entire Earth for years; and those species that were not immediately affected by the impact eventually succumbed to starvation.
Scientists find remains of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs
Today history can repeat itself, and although the probabilities of another meteorite impact like Chicxulub or a large volcanic eruption that expels large amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere are still on the table, another scenario that could cause a catastrophe of a similar magnitude would go through a nuclear conflict, even if it occurs on a small scale. This is at least one of the main conclusions of a study that under the title “Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection” published in magazine Nature Food.
According to its authors, beyond the destruction caused directly by the explosions and radiation, the detonation of nuclear weapons would cause massive fires that would inject enough soot into the atmosphere to block sunlight from reaching the surface and limit food production.
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The key is atmospheric soot
To reach her conclusions, Rutgers University crop and climate modeling expert, Lili Xia, lead author of the paper, and her colleagues, estimated based on the nuclear arsenals declared by different countries, the probable injection of soot into the atmosphere after a week of nuclear conflict. Also its impact on the main crops, fishing or livestock activity.
The authors then used these data to estimate the global calorie supply once stored food supplies were depleted. What they found in is that, even with mitigation measures, such as the reduction of food waste or the redirection for human consumption of crops that today are destined for animal feed or the production of biofuels, food production would be insufficient to guarantee supply in most nations.
The dangers of a regional nuclear conflict
Thus, the authors anticipate that any detonation of nuclear weapons that produces more than 5 teragrams (5 million tons) of soot would cause a massive food shortages in almost every country in the world, and they estimate that deaths induced by famines from a nuclear war, for example between India and Pakistan, could be around 2.5 billion in the two years after the outbreak of the war. For a nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia, famine-related deaths could reach 5 billion people, two-thirds of the world’s population.
The authors conclude that these findings once again demonstrate the far-reaching, albeit predictable, fatal consequences of a nuclear conflict for human and planetary healthas well as the importance of global cooperation to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
How would a nuclear war affect the global climate?
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