Landscapes which haven’t been seen for more than forty thousand years are now being unveiled due to melting glaciers, new research has found.
The research is focused on the Canadian Arctic, in particular Baffin Island, which has just seen its warmest century in approximately 115,000 years.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study suggests climate change is the reason behind this glacial retreat so we can expect to see even more changes in the very near future.
The research was published in Nature last week, and was carried out by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The study looked at Baffin Island in particular, as Phys.org reports the island has experienced ‘significant summertime warming’ in recent decades.
Simon Pendleton, lead author and a doctoral researcher in CU Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) told the publication:
The Arctic is currently warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe, so naturally, glaciers and ice caps are going to react faster.
Pendleton and his colleagues’ research focused on plants collected at the edge of ice caps on Baffin island, which is the fifth largest island in the world.
The landscape is dominated by deeply incised fjords and high-elevation, low-relief plateaus – these act as a ‘natural cold storage’ and preserve ancient moss and lichens in their original growth position.
Researchers took samples of these plants and found that all of them had likely been continuously covered by ice for the past 40,000 years – and have only just been revealed due to the ice melting.
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