While many of us spent our summer learning DIY home improvements and cutting our own hair, Mother Nature was enjoying her alone time as well. With no one out and about, animals were venturing into towns or returning to places they once called home. According to Beth Gardiner, National Geographic writer and publisher of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution, the amount of carbon emissions were lowered by 17 percent in April, when lockdown first began. This comes as a big change from the beginning of the year, but this os only lower by about 5 percent than the same time in 2019. (Gardiner, 2020)

Believe it or not, the pandemic has had more effects than the few that went viral. According to an article published by NASA in September 2020, the few amount of cars on the road may decrease pollution, but it also might increase the surface temperature of the earth. Christopher Potter, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in the Silicon Valley, studied how the lack of vehicles in parking lots, roads, and highways affected the amount of heat absorbed into the ground. With the NASA sensor on the International Space Station called ECOSTRESS, the NASA team is watching the San Fransisco Bay Area to measure the heat in the ground, to compare it to past years. (Goldbaum,2020)

While the ground is heating up, the air could be cooling down. William Smith and Dave Duda, researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia are studying contrails for longer than the pandemic. “Contrails,” explained by Duda, “are one of the only clouds we produce ourselves.” Travel bans from this pandemic has cancelled many flights, which in turn, reduces contrails. Duda and Smith are using a contrail detection algorithm to estimate the coverage of the United States and the North Atlantic air traffic corridor and comparing what they see to a baseline period from a few years before travel was limited. “You see the biggest impact when there’s an otherwise clear sky and contrails add cloudiness to it,” Duda stated, implying that of one forms in the middle of clouds, it has a less significant impact. (Goldbaum, 2020)

Although staying at home seemed to bring hope to humankind and saving the earth, it has also brought on increased waste and decreased recycling. The quarantine has prompted people to order groceries and food online, which produces an increase in organic waste. Many cities in the United States, and all over the world, have also halted recycling programs, in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Not only have recycling programs ended, but stores have stopped accepting reusable bags and cups, which results in an increase of plastic waste. (Zambrano-Monserrate, Ruano, Sanchez-Alcalde, 2020)

In conclusion, the pandemic brought hope to people frightened by the speedy downfall of the environment. While there is still hope, the pandemic also brought new challenges not expected by researchers.