Plant cover across the Antarctic peninsula has soared more than tenfold over the last few decades, as the climate crisis heats up the icy continent.
Analysis of satellite data found there was less than one sq kilometre of vegetation in 1986 but there was almost 12km2 of green cover by 2021. The spread of the plants, mostly mosses, has accelerated since 2016, the researchers found.
The growth of vegetation on a continent dominated by ice and bare rock is a sign of the reach of global heating into the Antarctic, which is warming faster than the global average. The scientists warned that this spread could provide a foothold for alien invasive species into the pristine Antarctic ecosystem.
Greening has also been reported in the Arctic, and in 2021 rain, not snow, fell on the summit of Greenland’s huge ice cap for the first time on record.
Prof Andrew Shepherd, at Northumbria University, UK, and not part of the study team, said: “This is a very interesting study and tallies with what I found when I visited Larsen Inlet [on the peninsula] a couple of years ago. We landed on a beach that was buried beneath the Larsen Ice Shelf until the shelf collapsed in 1986-88. We found it to now have a river with green algae growing in it!”
“This place had been hidden from the atmosphere for thousands of years and was colonised by plants within a couple of decades of it becoming ice free – it’s astonishing really,” he said. “It’s a barometer of climate change but also a tipping point for the region as life now has a foothold there.”