"US Research Team Proposes Covering Earth with 'Shade Screens' to Block Heatwaves"

Idea of a 'Giant Shade' to Stop Global Warming
Various Proposals Including 'Gyungeunchu' and 'Gipo Raft'
Weighing Millions of Tons... Currently Impossible to Realize

As the issue of heatwaves caused by climate change intensifies, American scientists have attracted attention by proposing the idea of installing a 'shade' between the sun and the Earth.

The US media outlet Politico reported on the 1st (local time) that scientists have proposed the idea of a 'giant sunshade' as a measure to curb climate change. This study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

According to the paper, if a shade is installed between the Earth and the sun, part of the solar radiation energy entering the Earth would be blocked. Theoretically, if 1.7% of sunlight is blocked, the average global temperature would decrease by 0.5 to 0.6 degrees Celsius.

This is not the first time the idea of a space sunshade has been proposed. In 1989, the international journal British Interplanetary Society Journal also suggested the idea that sunlight could be blocked using a space sunshade.

An imaginative image of a solar sail blocking sunlight. [Image source=NASA]

However, for the sunshade to be fixed in its proper position, its weight must be in the millions of tons. Otherwise, solar wind could damage the sunshade, or it could be pulled by the gravity of the Earth or the sun.

Currently, there is no method to tow an object weighing millions of tons into space, so the feasibility of this idea is almost nonexistent.

Meanwhile, Professor Istvan Szapudi, a space scientist at the University of Hawaii, proposed an idea to attach a 'counterweight' to the sunshade to fix its position without increasing its weight.

Professor Szapudi stated, "By utilizing a counterweight, lightweight materials such as graphene can be used," adding, "In this case, the required resources would be 3.5 million tons, which is about 100 times lighter than previously needed."

He continued, "If an asteroid captured in space is used as the counterweight, only the sunshade itself needs to be manufactured on Earth," adding, "The resources required to manufacture the sunshade would be only 1% of the total weight, about 35,000 tons."

He also predicted, "If this design is realized, it could not only mitigate the climate crisis within decades but also help reduce costs and installation time."

Other research institutions are also proposing ways to make the sunshade idea more practical. In July last year, a research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claimed that a 'giant bubble raft' made of thin silicon film bubbles could be floated in space.

The research team anticipated that if the bubbles were expanded to the size of Brazil's territory and floated, it could reduce solar radiation energy entering the Earth by 2%.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.