Shocking satellite image shows rapid ‘greening’ in Antarctica: ‘The risk here is clear’
That’s not cool.
Antarctica is warming at a rate so rapid that the frozen region’s green vegetation has grown tenfold in the past four decades, according to a concerni💞ng new
Since 1986, “greening” on the Antarctic Peninsula expanded from under half a square mile to nearly five square miles by 2021, warned researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire.
Just from 2016 to 2021, there was a 30% increase at a rate of about 478,396 square yards — close to 4,000 football fields — in the five-year span. The peninsula is located in the western section of the continent and is comparatively close to both the Atlantic Ocean’s perilous Drake Passage and South America.
“We could see fundamental changes to the biology and landscape of this iconic and vulnerable region,” said Dr. Thomas Roland.
Specifically, his concerns reside in how the greening will allow more soil — what used to be almost “nonexistent” there — to form, thus paving the way for foreign invasive species to alter the southernmost point of the globe.
“Seeds, spores and plant fragments can readily find their way to the Antarctic Peninsula on the boots or equipment of tourists and researchers, or via more ‘traditional’ routes associated with migrating birds and the wind,” .
“So the risk here is clear.”
The next step to better understand and battle the phenomenon is calculating how long it currently takes and will do so in the future for the spread of plant life, “in order to protect Antarctica.”
Still, Roland recognized that only a small sector of the world’s fifth-largest continent is going through this greening.
“The landscape is still almost entirely dominated by snow, ice and rock, with only a tiny fraction colonized by plant life,” he said.
“But that tiny fraction has grown dramatically – showing that even this vas📖t and isolated ‘wilderness’ is being affected by ant♑hropogenic climate change.”
