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Antartica

Posted by Alexander (Guest) - Wednesday, October 29 2003, 0:50:13 (EST)
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Warming warning for Antarctica

Tim Radford
Tuesday September 9, 2003
The Guardian

The face of Antarctica will change in the next 100 years as ice melts, glaciers retreat, penguins move south and green plants begin to colonise bare rocks of the Antarctic peninsula, researchers warned yesterday.
"We know parts of Antarctica are warming, and they are warming very rapidly," Andrew Clarke of the British Antarctic Survey told the British Association festival.

"The Antarctic Peninsula is one of three points on the globe that is warming particularly quickly at the moment."

Climate had 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' time 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 10 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," Professor 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 3,000 metres of compacted ice and snow, and the continent is the repository of nine tenths of the world's fresh water.

The mainland is still pristine, but the Southern ocean has been exploited for 200 years by whalers, sealers, commercial fishermen, and most recently, tourists.

John Shears, the survey's environmental officer, told the conference that last year 13,500 tourists visited the region in cruise ships. This season the number could reach 27,000.

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