Saving the Dark: CMS VATAVARAN 2019 Nomination Series

The night sky is vanishing. It is said that 80% of the city residents can not see the Milky Way on an average day. It’s becoming harder and harder to pick out our place in the universe!

How hard is it?

In a new study for Science Advances, an international team of researchers created the most detailed atlas yet of light pollution around the world. They estimate that the Milky Way is no longer visible to fully one-third of humanity — including 60 percent of Europeans and 80 percent of Americans.

Artificial light from cities has created a permanent "skyglow" at night, obscuring our view of the stars. It’s not just cities — dark-sky refuges are becoming rarer and rarer. While the level of light pollution in cities has only increased.

What is surprising is how far the glow from these lights reaches out into outskirts and unpopulated areas. That matters, because for those who do want to see the stars in all their glory (or for astronomers trying to use telescopes), it’s harder to find skies unblemished by artificial light.

If you lived in Switzerland, you’d have to travel more than 1,000 kilometers. The United States still has a few dark-sky areas — particularly around southeastern Oregon, western Utah, and northern Arizona. But even those are being encroached upon by light from nearby cities like Las Vegas.

That said, there is an optimistic side to this story.

As scientists have piled up evidence of the dangers of too much light pollution — from energy waste to sleep disruption — more cities are finding ways to cut down the glare.

And many US parks are taking new measures to preserve what remaining dark skies we have.

While it's implausible that cities will ever go totally dark, there are ways to reduce the harm from light pollution — and preserve what dark spots we have remaining.

At first blush, it's hard to imagine why light pollution is a problem. Sure, it's nice to gaze at the constellations. But artificial lighting is also incredibly valuable.

We no longer have to squint to read by candlelight or hold up a lantern to walk down streets at night. But we’ve also arguably gone overboard with modern-day urban lighting.

As Christopher Kyba of Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum in Germany, has found that excessive artificial lighting at night can have a number of adverse consequences. Light pollution can disrupt our sleep.

Some research suggests that exposure to certain wavelengths of light at night can suppress our bodies' ability to produce melatonin — and disrupt our slumber. This is why it's harder to fall asleep right after staring at your computer screen all evening (blue light is particularly disruptive).

But light pollution in cities coming through bedroom windows may also play a role here. It messes with wildlife.

In the last decade, scientists have begun to realize that artificial lighting at night affects animals and ecosystems in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Sea turtles get confused by the lighting from coastal cities and lose their ability to navigate in the ocean. Migrating birds often get bewildered by tall buildings that are lit up and smash right into them. Some scientists even suspect that artificial lighting at night makes it harder for fireflies to find each other and mate.

These ecological impacts can trickle over to humans, too. There's some evidence that artificial lighting can, for example, make it harder for zooplankton to eat away at harmful algae in lakes, which lowers drinking water quality.

It's a big waste of energy.

Lighting at night is useful. But do we need so much of it?

Many street lamps are built so that they shine light in every direction (including up at the sky) rather than focusing purely on the ground. And many streetlights shine even in the wee hours when no one actually needs them.

By some estimates, 40 percent of a city's electric bill goes toward street lighting — and about half of that is simply wasted. It can diminish our sense of the universe. Increasingly, urban youth only see constellations on computer screens or in planetariums.

The lack of the night sky may therefore affect their sense of the scale of the universe and their place in it. Astronomy is the oldest science. It’s because people have been looking at these lights in the sky and these comets and planets and wondering what’s going on up there. It’s really stimulating.

80% of the world’s population can no longer see the Milky Way. What do we lose when we lose sight of the stars? Excessive and improper lighting robs us of our night skies, disrupts our sleep patterns and endangers nocturnal habitats. The current advances in LED technology have enabled several cities to safely light their streets and save energy without disrupting the nighttime environment. Saving the Dark explores the need to preserve night skies and what we can do to combat light pollution. 

 Director: Sriram Murali

Photograph Courtesy-

Sriram Murali

https://conxcorp.com

https://pixabay.com/