Antarctica Is Not Supposed To Be This Green

Antarctica has a few touchstones most of our brains likely grab when we hear the word — ice, penguins, cold. As the most remote, foreign, and inhospitable corner of the planet, that probably about covers it. “Green” is safely off that particular menu.

While many people may know that the ice at the bottom of the world is melting at truly disturbing rates, that doesn’t make it a plant life paradise or anything. But it’s getting there: a study published Friday in Nature Geoscience found that a corner of the continent called the Antarctic Peninsula has undergone “widespread greening” in recent years, opening up the frozen wastes to a bit more moss and other photosynthesizing life.

“[W]e demonstrate a clear but nonlinear trend towards a greater area of vegetation cover,” wrote study authors led by Thomas Roland and Oliver Bartlett, both of the University of Exeter in the U.K. They analyzed archived satellite imagery from Landsat between 1986 and 2021, and though the overall numbers are relatively small there was a striking change in that period: from under one square kilometer (0.863, to be exact) of vegetation cover to almost 12 square kilometers (11.9.47, for completeness), or up to around three of New York’s Central Park.

And this will shock you, but the greening trend is accelerating: for the full study period the vegetation spread by 0.317 square kilometers per year, while between 2016 and 2021 that rate was 0.424 square km per year.

In general, the polar regions of the world are warming at faster rates than the global average. The Antarctic Peninsula itself has shown some somewhat odd variability, but it is likely to keep getting greener and greener over the coming years. “Climate model projections suggest that regional temperature rise will remain well above the global average,” the authors wrote. The findings have local ecosystem implications, and also just serves as yet another general warning that humans are changing the cold places of the world in dramatic ways.