Believe it or not: this lush landscape is the Antarctic
Believe it or not: this lush landscape is the Antarctic
an Rapidly heated region of Antarctic becomes greener at terrifying speed. Satellite images show that the area covered with plants has increased almost 14 times in the past 35 years-a trend that at rapid changes in Antarctic ecosystems will lead.
"It is the beginning of a dramatic transformation," says Olly Bartlett, a specialist for remote sensing at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, Great Britain, and co-author of the study published in Nature Geoscience today 1 that reports these results.
from white to green
Bartlett and his colleagues analyzed pictures that were taken from the Antarctic Peninsula between 1986 and 2021 - part of the continent that stretches north to South America. The pictures were from Landsat satellite NASA and the US Geological Survey recorded in March, the end of the growth period for vegetation in Antarctic.
In order to determine how much land was covered by vegetation, the researchers used the properties of growing plants: healthy plants absorb a lot of red light and reflect a lot of close infrared light. Scientists can use satellite measurements of this light to determine whether a piece of land is covered by flourishing plants.
The team found that the area of the peninsula, which is covered with plants, grew from less than a square kilometer in 1986 to almost 12 square kilometers in 2021 (see "A icy country becomes green"). The expansion rate between 2016 and 2021 was approximately 33% higher compared to the entire four decades.
"These numbers shocked us," says Thomas Roland, a co -author of the study and environmental scientist at the University of Exeter, Great Britain. "It is simply this change rate in an extremely isolated, extremely vulnerable area that triggers the alarm."
Research is "really important," says Jasmine Lee, a nature conservation scientist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, Great Britain. Other studies 2 , 3 have found indications that the vegetation on the peninsula is changed in response to climate change, "but this is the first study to pursue a large-scale approach to consider the entire region," she says.
Earlier visits to the authors on the peninsula led them to the assumption that most plants are moss. Since mosses spread to landscapes previously covered by ice, they will build a layer of earth that offers habitat for other plant species, explains Roland. "There is great potential here to observe a further increase in the number of non -native, potentially invasive species," he says.
This is worrying because the local flora of the Antarctic is adapted to extreme conditions and may not be able to compete with an influx of other species, says Lee.
The researchers attribute the change of the landscape from white to green to climate change. The temperatures on the peninsula have risen by almost 3 ° C since 1950, which is a much larger increase than was observed in most other parts of the planet. The “phenomenal” expansion rate of vegetation, says Roland, emphasizes the unprecedented changes that impose people on earth to the earth.
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Roland, T. P. et al. Nature Geosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01564-5 (2024).
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amesbury, M. J. et al. Curr. Biol. 27, 1616–1622 (2017).