The Arctic Is Getting Greener.
That's Bad News for All of Us
From space and with drones, scientists are watching the Arctic get greener. That's troubling both for the region, and the planet as a whole.
wired.com
Right now the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and transforming in massively consequential ways. Rapidly melting permafrost is gouging holes in the landscape. Thousands of years’ worth of wet accumulated plant matter known as peat is drying out and burning in unprecedented wildfires. Lightning—a phenomenon more suited to places like Florida— is now striking within 100 miles of the North Pole.
All the while, researchers are racing to quantify how the plant species of the Arctic are coping with a much, much warmer world. In a word, well. And probably: too well. Using satellite data, drones, and on-the-ground fieldwork, a team of dozens of scientists—ecologists, biologists, geographers, climate scientists, and more—is finding that vegetation like shrubs, grasses, and sedges are growing more abundant. The phenomenon is known as “Arctic greening,” and with it comes a galaxy of strange and surprising knock-on effects with implications both for the Arctic landscape and the world’s climate at large.
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