Climate change is rapidly expanding the size of the world's tropical zone, threatening to bring disease and drought to heavily populated areas, an Australian study has found.
MELBOURNE: Climate change is rapidly expanding the size of the world's tropical zone, threatening to bring disease and drought to heavily populated areas, an Australian study has found.
Researchers at James Cook University concluded the tropics had widened by up to 500 kilometers in the past 25 years after examining 70 peer-reviewed scientific articles.
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They looked at findings from long-term satellite measurements, weather balloon data, climate models and sea temperature studies to determine how global warming was impacting on the tropical zone.
The findings showed it now extended well beyond the traditional definition of the tropics, the equatorial band circling the Earth between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.
