Believe it or not, this lush landscape is Antarctica | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not, this lush landscape is Antarctica

nature.com

29 pointsbookofjoe18 comments

Keep in mind that Ardley Island is approximately 3000 km from the South Pole. Antartica is an extreme environment, but the edges are much less extreme.

https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Ardley_Is...

I was in that area back in 2008 and it looked the same. Entire islands covered with green moss.

Thanks for the data point. I saw the headline and thought "I don't know how it normally looks" :-)

The green area of Antarctica according to the graph in this link is 12 km². The area of Antarctica is 14,200,000 km², i.e. 0.0008% is green. Seems like a noise data point.

This study was specific to the Antarctic Peninsula, not all of Antarctica. The study further restricted analysis to only areas below 300m ASL and free of ice, snow, and clouds.

This is still a very small percentage of green, but orders of magnitude larger than 0.0008%.

The area that was green in the recent years is 100% green, that is indeed much more than 0.0008%.

Or does your answer imply that there are other green areas of Antarctica, outside of the Antarctic Peninsula, but they only focused the search on the Peninsula?

I wonder which is better for lowering global temperatures, reflective ice or the new vegetation?

Seems like a good thing? Am I missing something? I know that extremophiles will have a hard time adapting as their habitats become more livable, but on the whole it seems like a win for planet earth.

I think the concerning subtext would be if Antarctica is turning from ice to green, what changes will we see in the current green areas we enjoy, and what will that mean to as far as livable regions on earth?

The main change would probably be, in order for Antarctica to become green, all the ice would have to come off it. How would that happen, and where would it go? It would have to melt, and run into the ocean as water.

What that will mean for the liveable regions of Earth is that as the sea level rises, less of the coastal areas -- where AFAIK most people live -- will be inhabitable.

In the interim it could be quite disruptive for humans (flooding, extreme heat in once livable places, etc.) but on the whole warming has typically been very good for life.

Global cooling would be catastrophic.

Based on other mass extinctions, we can expect ten+ million years of very low life diversity during this extinction that we're causing. So, for a period much longer than humans have been around (which you describe as "the interim"), we will experience only the dying. No human will experience any eventual recovery of biosphere diversity which may occur, long after we are gone.

Are we seeing mass extinction caused by warming though? I see extinctions caused by pyrethroids, chemical runoff, excessive hunting, deforestation, overfishing, cats, other direct human caused disruption to biomes, but directly from carbon dioxide emission? Maybe I missed it, but so far it's just warnings that fail to materialize where carbon emission is concerned, unless I'm misinformed.

One very direct consequence of CO2 pollution is increased ocean acidification, which interferes with the chemistry for building shells and other calciferous structures that many marine animals depend on. A warm ocean can dissolve more CO2, which makes it acidic, like a carbonated drink.

The Great Barrier Reef is now thought to be doomed to coral bleaching in the next few decades. Half has been lost already.

Another example is that biomes are moving at rates ten times faster than we'd expect from natural climate change. That is it say, plants and animals and fungi need to move ten times faster uphill or toward the poles to keep up. This is being documented in mountainous rainforests, but the sheer number of species in those areas is so high, and their natural ranges so small, that some are no doubt being lost before they can be discovered.

Even if all those species could keep up with the pace of change (and they can't), the unlucky ones will find themselves with nowhere to go. Some climates won't move, they'll disappear. Even if a suitable climate opens up somewhere else on earth, species are not known for teleporting.

It's not recommendable to wait for the warnings "to materialize" because the game will already be lost.

I'm not sure if it's because here in North America summer has ended and the days are starting to get shorter, or maybe there's something hardwired in people to hear that vegetation is flourishing and think of it as a good thing but viscerally I had the same reaction.

Intellectually I can understand that the reason for this growth is the earth is warming causing the ice caps to melt and the ramifications for this are worse than however good seeing a bit of moss makes me feel, not to mention, as is addressed at the end of the article, the potential for invasive species to wind up overtaking what I assume must be an extremely niche biome and oh God we are completely screwed.

Still: moss. Nice. I like it.

Edit: typo

Not for us. Mosses will be fine.

About our most heavily exploited fisheries on the planet, well... that will be an interesting question. Coral islands and coastal cities also will have a lot of aquatic fun for all public.

In the end unless we glass the earth with thermonuclear war, the earth will continue to adapt and flourish in one form or another.

Yes, a mass extinction event is a possible outcome, but that has happened before and it just led to more diversity.

Humans are pretty screwed though as we chase fewer and fewer resources, but at the end of the day, the earth DNGAF about us and it will happily say good riddance to bad tenants.

> it will happily say good riddance to bad tenants.

I don't think this is a good analogy: tenants are other people, who came from somewhere else, who rent your house temporarily.

Humans are (as far as we can tell so far) entirely native to Earth: we evolved here.

So we're really very much like a cancer: an original part of the organism, but toxic and deadly to it.

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