11 Nov 2024        10:48:54 am

Geography

Antarctic Peninsula

Tags : Antarctic Peninsula

Topic: Antarctica

Why in the news?

• A new study published in Nature Geoscience, reveals that the Antarctic Peninsula is dramatically greening. 
• The vegetation cover of this 70-km-long mountain chain has shown a 10-fold increase since 1986. It increased from less than one sq. km. in 1986 to almost twelve sq. km. in 2021, with an accelerated rate of change from 2016-2021, the study warned.

Source: Down To Earth

About Antarctic Peninsula:

• It is part of the larger peninsula of West Antarctica, protruding from a line between Cape Adams (Weddell Sea) and a point on the mainland south of the Eklund Islands. 
• Beneath the ice sheet that covers it, the Antarctic Peninsula consists of a string of bedrock islands separated by deep channels whose bottoms lie at depths below sea level. 
  • They are joined by a grounded ice sheet. Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, is about 1,000 km. away across the Drake Passage.
• The marine ecosystem around the western continental shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula  has been subjected to rapid climate change. 
  • Over the past 50 years, the warm, moist maritime climate of the northern WAP has shifted south. This climatic change increasingly displaces the once dominant cold, dry continental Antarctic climate. 
  • This regional warming has caused multi-level responses in the marine ecosystem such as increased heat transport, decreased sea ice extent and duration, local declines in ice-dependent Adélie penguins, increase in ice-tolerant gentoo and chinstrap penguins, alterations in phytoplankton and zooplankton community composition as well as changes in krill recruitment, abundance and availability to predators.

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