The study found that Antarctica's green cover has grown dramatically.
The icy Antarctica is known for its vast white landscape. But extreme heat and climate change are turning parts of the continent green, according to a worrying new study. Scientists from the Universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire have used satellite images and data to analyze vegetation levels in Antarctica, which is warming at an alarming rate, much faster than the global average. According to CNNthe team of researchers found plants – mainly mosses – and said that green cover has increased tenfold in the last forty or forty years.
The research was published in the journal on Friday Natural Geosciences.
From a meager 0.4 square kilometers in 1986, vegetation cover reached almost 5 square kilometers in 2021, the study found. In a period of five years – from 2016 to 2021 – accelerated by more than 30 percent.
“Our findings confirm that the impact of anthropogenic climate change knows no bounds in its scope,” said study author Thomas Roland, an environmental scientist at the University of Exeter. CNN. “Even on the Antarctic Peninsula – this most extreme, remote and isolated 'wilderness area' – the landscape is changing, and these effects are visible from space.”
Although the landscape is almost entirely snow, these researchers found that green cover has grown dramatically.
At a conference in Chile in August, nearly 1,500 academics, researchers and scientists discussed whether the extreme climate events meant Antarctica had reached a tipping point, or a point of accelerated and irreversible sea ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
“You might see the same increase in CO2 emissions thousands of years from now, and now it's already happened in a hundred years,” says Liz Keller, a paleoclimate specialist at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, has witnessed severe extreme heat.
In the summer months this year, average temperatures on the continent rose to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
In March 2022, temperatures in some parts of Antarctica reached up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, the most extreme temperature variation ever recorded on the continent.