Blame the Vikings! Moss found in East Antarctica lived in warmer summers a thousand years ago.

Pohlia nutans moss. Photo by Hermann Schachner

By Jo Nova

Around 1,000AD, a little delicate moss (just like the one above), lived in a spot in Antarctica which is now locked in snow and ice all year round, and considered hyper arid and perennially frozen. No one expected to find nodding thread-moss (Pohlia Nutans) on Boulder Clay Glacier.

Researchers had to drill through 11 meters of ice to find it (or what’s left of it) and managed to date it to 1,050 years before present. This puts it smack in the centre of the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings were marauding England, showing that this part of Antarctica was warmer 1000 years ago than it is today, even though humans have poured forth 1.8 trillion tons of greenhouse gases.

At the same time as the mosses grew, there was a veritable population boom of penguins and elephant seals in the Ross Sea next door, right up until the brutal cold of the Little Ice Age wiped them out.

Pohlia nutans, needs liquid water and warmer summers. In order to grow, it has to find land that is ice free in summer has rain or melted water. Mosses can’t survive in this area now.

Thanks to Kenneth Richards at NoTricksZone for finding the study.

Boulder-Clay Glacier, Figure 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02259-4#Sec10

Spare a thought for the life of an Antarctic moss. They spend 9 or 10 months of the year buried in snow, hoping for a five or six weeks of warmth so they can grow a few millimeters. If they’re lucky they might catch some floating penguin poo dust for nutrients. If they’re not lucky the summers get cold for thousand years, and they’re buried in 11 meters of snow.

Apparently, some mosses have survived 5,000 years stuck under a glacier, and can still spring back to life, not just from spores but from dormant tissue itself.

It sort of suggests this sort of climatic mayhem has happened before?

Fully 120 proxies show the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon. Yet the climate industry depends on it not being true. Everything that shows the world was warmer shows that our coal plants and cars are irrelevant. That nature does it all by herself, and that thousands of IPCC experts have been selectively skewing their stories to get bigger grants, or are just too scared to say what they really thought lest they be called a “climate denier”.

That, and the media ignoring hundreds of stories like these.

Fig. S6. Details of the two moss species embedded in the ice core: A) Bryum pseudotriquetrum (13 mm long); B) Pohlia nutans (10 mm long). Note: the scale is in cm, but the pictures are enlarged respectively 5.4 and 7.8 times.

For more information:

• Medieval Warm Period found in 120 proxies. Plus Roman era was similar to early 20th Century.
• Climate helped drive Vikings from Greenland
• The Medieval Warm Period hit west Antarctica
• Antarctica was warmer one thousand years ago — and life was OK

REFERENCE

Forte, E., Azzaro, M., Cannone, N. et al. A warming pulse in the Antarctic continent changed the landscape during the Middle Ages. Commun Earth Environ 6, 281 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02259-4