On warming Antarctic Peninsula, moss and microbes reveal unprecedented ecological change

Terra Daily via SPX: By carefully analyzing a 150-year-old moss bank on the Antarctic Peninsula, researchers reporting in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on August 29 describe an unprecedented rate of ecological change since the 1960s driven by warming temperatures.

"Whilst moss and amoebae may not be the first organisms that come to mind when considering Antarctica, they are dominant components of the year-round terrestrial ecosystem in the small ice-free zones during an austral summer," says Jessica Royles of the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Cambridge.

"We know from meteorological measurements and from the interpretation of signals preserved within ice and sediment cores that the climate of the Antarctic Peninsula has undergone substantial and rapid change. Our evidence, from the southernmost known moss bank, exploits an unusual biological archive and shows that the flora and fauna of the Antarctic Peninsula are very sensitive and have in the past responded, and continue to respond, to these changes in climate."

The researchers looked to the Antarctic Peninsula because it is one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth; annual temperatures there have increased by up to 0.56 C per decade since the 1950s.

There they found a moss bank that has been slowly growing at the top surface and accumulating peat material since it first established in about 1860. By analyzing core samples of that moss bank, Royles, Matthew Amesbury of the University of Exeter, and their colleagues were able to characterize the growth and activity of the moss and microbes over time....

Brown Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula, shot by Aman Malik, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license