Stunning photos startled people.
Scientists used satellite images and data to analyze vegetation levels on the Antarctic Peninsula, a long mountain range that points north toward the tip of South America and is warming much faster than the global average.
Scientists have found that plant life, mostly mosses, has increased in this harsh environment more than 10-fold over the past four decades. The study, by scientists from the Universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire in England and the British Antarctic Survey, was published Friday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Vegetation covered less than 0.4 square miles of the Antarctic Peninsula in 1986, but has reached almost 5 square miles by 2021, the study found. The rate at which the region has been greening for almost four decades is also accelerating, accelerating by more than 30% between 2016 and 2021.
Antarctica is still covered almost entirely by snow, ice and rock, this small green area has grown dramatically since the mid-1980s, said Thomas Roland, a study author and environmental scientist at the University of Exeter.
“Our findings confirm that the impact of anthropogenic climate change has no boundaries in its scope,” Roland told CNN. “Even on the Antarctic Peninsula – that most extreme, remote and isolated region of the ‘wilderness’ – the landscape is changing and these effects are visible from space.
Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, has recently been gripped by extreme heat.
This summer, parts of the icy continent experienced a record heat wave, with temperatures rising to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal since mid-July.
In March 2022, temperatures in some parts of the continent reached 70 degrees above normal, the most extreme temperature deviations ever recorded in this part of the planet.
#stunning #photo #Antarctica #people #worried
