Antarctica’s icy landscape turns green: What happened to the frozen continent? Here lies the answer

Antarctica, located in the South Pole, as shown in pictures and portrayed in movies is a frozen, icy desert with blizzards and unforgiving climate. Surrounded by ice shelves the continent features penguins and seals as the only life forms. However, there is a big surprise waiting for us all. 

Hit by global warming and climate change, a fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region shows the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems. 

A study analysed images taken between 1986 and 2021 of the Antarctic Peninsula — a part of the continent that juts north towards the tip of South America. The pictures were taken by the Landsat satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey in March, which is the end of the growing season for vegetation in the Antarctic. 

The study found that the area of the peninsula swathed in plants grew from less than 1 square kilometre in 1986 to nearly 12 square kilometres in 2021. The rate of expansion was roughly 33 percent higher between 2016 and 2021 compared with the four-decade study period as a whole. 

“It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” said Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study, which was published in Nature Geoscience. 

Jasmine Lee, a conservation scientist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, said the research is “really important”. Other studies have found evidence that vegetation on the peninsula is changing in response to climate change, “but this is the first study that's taken a huge-scale approach to look at the entire region”, she told Nature. 

Researchers point to climate change as the driver of the landscape’s shift from white to green. Temperatures on the peninsula have risen by almost 3°C since 1950, which is a much bigger increase than observed across most parts of the planet.

The “phenomenal” rate of expansion of greenery, Roland says, highlights the unprecedented changes that humans are imposing on Earth’s climate. “These numbers shocked us,” says Thomas Roland, a study co-author and an environmental scientist at the University of Exeter, UK. “It's simply that rate of change in an extremely isolated, extremely vulnerable area that causes the alarm.”