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Antarctica rapidly getting greener, researchers say

The face of Antarctica will change in the next 100 years, as ice melts, glaciers retreat, penguins move south and green plants begin to colonize bare rocks of the Antarctic peninsula, according to researchers.

"We know parts of Antarctica are warming, and they are warming very rapidly," Andrew Clarke of the British Antarctic Survey told the British Association science festival this week.

"The Antarctic Peninsula is one of three points on the globe that is warming particularly quickly at the moment." Climate has always changed, but the change now was particularly rapid and could trigger unexpected events, he warned.

"It looks as though we have set upon something which could change the face of the globe, and in this context, change the face of Antarctica quite rapidly."

In 100 years the Southern ocean atmosphere would be warmer, with much less ice and snow on the peninsula. More ice shelves would collapse. Green plants were already five or ten times more common than when explorers built the first bases.

Seals and whales would move their feeding grounds. The breeding grounds for all the continent's penguin species were shifting south, perhaps because, paradoxically, warmer air meant more snow, and therefore greater difficulty in maintaining nests.

"The pattern of snowfall is important to a penguin's breeding. It doesn't want to sit on a nest and have a metre of snow above it. So the breeding sites are very carefully tuned."

It looked as though the change in the pattern of population could be explained by a change in the pattern of snowfall. To get the right conditions, various penguin species had all begun to move south. But the pattern of ice was also important, because the birds had to trek to the edge of the ice shelf to feed.

"Many Antarctic organisms are susceptible to very small changes in temperature," Clarke said. "So if some of the more extreme projections of temperature change in the sea eventuate, it is likely that we will have some extinctions."

Antarctica is the world's last remaining wilderness region. It is larger than the US and drier than the Sahara.

Parts of it are covered by up to 3km of compacted ice and snow, and the continent is the repository of nine-tenths of the world's fresh water.
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