Due to warming, a region of Antarctica is experiencing accelerated greening

2024-10-04 10:44:22

In the Antarctic Peninsula, a region located north of the southernmost continent, plant cover has increased more than tenfold in the last four decades, according to one study.

Ice and snow as far as the eye can see. This is how we imagine the extreme south of our planet. However, the Antarctic Peninsula is beginning to resemble in some places a vast meadow covered with mosses, lichens and liverworts. A study published Friday in the magazine Nature geoscience reveals that in this region, the northernmost of Antarctica, plant cover has increased more than tenfold in the last four decades.

THE “greening” This area is nothing new: says Thomas Roland, researcher at the University of Exeter and lead author of the study« at the height of the last ice age, there were more than 20 000 years, a much larger part of the peninsula would have been covered in ice. The deglaciation occurred around 2pm 000 at 6 000 years ago, when we entered the current interglacial period (i.e. the warm period, ed.), “the Holocene”