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Usually there is no worry of getting blind when looking at comets passing close to Earth. But according to astronomers that can happen if people are not careful when they look at the sky to get a glimpse of “comet McNaught”.

The comet was visible in the Southern Hemisphere near the horizon from dawn to dusk. It passed very close to the sun, so many of the observers are being cautioned not to look directly at the rising or setting of the star.

This fiery apparition that was seen in the morning through a gap in the clouds above Christchurch, New Zealand is claimed to be the brightest comet seen in 40 years. Because of this, the officials trained the crowds to look at the comet in a safe way.

The Australian astronomer Robert McNaught had seen the comet last August through a telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. This celestial body’s orbit was close to the sun and thus became visible to the eye in the northern hemisphere.

McNaught has had the nearest brush with the sun and became visible only to Southern Hemisphere sky-watchers. This comet is right now, 6.2-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) comet and is around 74.5 million miles (120 million kilometers) away from Earth and is traveling at around 62 miles (100 kilometers) a second. This once-in-a-lifetime view will be available for a few more days.

This is perhaps the first time that global warming has caused the reduction of pollution. This melting sea ice in the Arctic is allowing the ocean waters to soak more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The retreating ice has increased the amount of co2 soaked in to around 3 times more.

Nick Bates belonging to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences and colleagues calculated the amount of CO2 uptake in the Arctic Ocean from the measurements made from the Chuckchi Sea and Canada basin in 2002 and 2004. It has been found that CO2 uptake from the atmosphere increased mainly during the summer months, when the sea ice was in the least levels.

“Sea ice acts as a barrier to gas exchange,” says Bates.

It is presently calculated that the entire Arctic Ocean is now able to absorb around 66 million tonnes of CO2 per year. If there is a continued ice-melt, then it could increase the absorption by another 20 million tonnes per decade.

The bleak side of the argument is that this is not enough to get rid of the affects of global warming, because presently the emission world wide are around 30 billion tonnes per year.