Credit: coolantarctica.com
Natural climate variation is and always has been an ongoing process in Antarctica, just like everywhere else. Research suggests conditions similar to recent years prevailed about 850 years ago in at least one region.
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Mosses, one of the few types of plants living in Antarctica, have a tenuous existence, threatened by advancing glaciers, says the U.S. National Science Foundation.
When glaciers move, they can entomb or cover a plant — starving it of light and warmth. Scientists have discovered that the timing of when a glacier killed a moss, the kill date, provides an archive of glacier history.
The date the plant died coincides with the time the glacier advanced over that location. As glaciers recede, the previously entombed mosses are exposed, now dead and black.
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