More great journalism from The Guardian:
Climate change is turning Antarctica green, say researchers
Or maybe it isn’t. Check out the brave actual prediction:
“Antarctica is not going to become entirely green, but it will become more green than it currently is,” said Matt Amesbury, co-author of the research from the University of Exeter.
Can I just say, the mean thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet is 2.16 km. I don’t know many plants that grow through one meter of ice.
Scientists studying banks of moss in Antarctica have found that the quantity of moss, and the rate of plant growth, has shot up in the past 50 years, suggesting the continent may have a verdant future.
There is more chance that Santa Claus will move in.
Maybe scientists will engineer frost resistant plants that survive at minus fifty. Right now, tonight, the centre of Antarctica is only five degrees below that.
Fifty years from now, plants that survive minus 50 will have a home…
Spot the out-of-date, old cherry picking:
In the second half of the 20th century, the Antarctic Peninsula experienced rapid temperature increases, warming by about half a degree per decade.
Nobody mention that in the last 20 years the Antarctic Peninsula cooled by almost 1 degree.
News from 20 years ago? Call the Guardian an “oldspaper”.
So some bits of moss are growing on some corners of Antarctica. Should we thank the blob of superheated magma lying underneath?
All stories on Antarctica
- CO2 hits record high: Antarctic temperatures do nothing
- The non-disaster of 150,000 missing penguins? They just went somewhere else.
- Giant blob of superheated rock under West Antarctica