World is getting greener, India and China leading efforts: NASA study

China alone accounts for 25 per cent of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6 per cent of global vegetated area.

India and China are leading the global greening effort, which is quite contrary to the general perception worldwide, a latest NASA study said Monday, observing that the world is a greener place than it was 20 years ago.

The NASA study based on data received and analysed from its satellite said that India and China are leading in greening on land. "China and India account for one-third of the greening but contain only 9 per cent of the planet's land area covered in vegetation," said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University.

"That is a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from over exploitation," he said.

The study published on February 11, in the journal Nature Sustainability said that recent satellite data reveal a greening pattern that is strikingly prominent in China and India and overlaps with croplands world-wide.

China alone accounts for 25 per cent of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6 per cent of global vegetated area.

The greening in China is from forests (42 per cent) and croplands (32 per cent), but in India it is mostly from croplands (82 percent) with minor contribution from forests (4.4 per cent), the NASA study said.

China is engineering ambitious programmes to conserve and expand forests with the goal of mitigating land degradation, air pollution and climate change.

Food production in China and India has increased by over 35 per cent since 2000 mostly owing to an increase in harvested area through multiple cropping facilitated by fertiliser use and surface- and/or groundwater irrigation.

When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and a co-author of the study.

This study was made possible thanks to a two-decade-long data record from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. Now with the MODIS data, we see that humans are also contributing, she said.

Observing that once people realise there is a problem, they tend to fix it, Nemani said in the 1970s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss was not good.

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As Isro works on human spaceflight, a glimpse of challenges from the past

On one day in 1973, three American astronauts on board the Skylab space-station closed their radio link with NASA ground stations and took time off to chill.

On December 28, the Government of India okayed India’s first human spaceflight programme at a cost of Rs 9,023 crore. The programme will attempt to launch three Indian astronauts to low-Earth orbit for as many as seven days. If the mission – slated to happen in 2022 – succeeds, India will become only the fourth country in the world able to launch astronauts into space.

It is not yet clear what the astronauts will do in space. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which is leading the programme, has said they will perform some science experiments on their first flight but nothing of what comes after. But there’s no doubt that there are a lot of possibilities, and that astronauts – Indian and otherwise – have lots left to do in the coming decades. They’re crucial in everything from extraterrestrial mining to Mars missions, space diplomacy to weaponisation,.

In this sense, it is important for space organisations to maintain a keen awareness of their spacefarers’ fitness. Humans aren’t naturally equipped to deal with the alien nature of space, to live in confined quarters with zero gravity, no horizon in sight and with limited resources. If they have coping issues up there, things can get rapidly and profoundly disastrous for all involved.

NASA experienced one of the first such incidents (although there haven’t been many) 45 years ago. On one day in 1973, the three American astronauts on board the Skylab space-station closed their radio link with NASA ground stations and took time off to chill.

ALSO READ: Year in space: Isro gears up for busy 2019 after successful 2018

The Skylab was a space-station owned by the US and operated by NASA. Skylab 4 was the last mission on it. It began on November 16, 1973, with astronauts Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and William Pogue. At the time of launch, the trio was told that their mission would last at least 60 days – a record at the time. It eventually lasted 84 days.

The two previous crews that had been on Skylab had completed a large amount of work – “150% of their science goals”, according to one telling. This gave NASA the impression that pushing the astronauts to do more was okay, even though the commanders of the two previous manned Skylab missions advised against it. And because Carr, Gibson and Pogue would be the last astronauts onboard the experimental space-station, NASA also wanted to make sure they’d also finish all other pending experiments.

The result was that the astronauts would have to work 16 hours a day for the entire duration of the mission.

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