New tourist destination? They discover a hidden landscape for more than 40 000 years in the Arctic – 30/01/2019

The retreat of glaciers in the Arctic Canadian left uncovered landscapes of more than 40 000 years ago that were hidden, at a very special moment for the region, since knows its hottest century for 115,000 years.

A study from the University of Colorado at Boulder used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of plants harvested near 30 layers of ice on Baffin Island, west of British Columbia. Greenland. The island has experienced significant warming during the summer in recent decades.

"The Arctic is currently warming two or three times faster than the rest of the worldNaturally, glaciers and ice caps will react more quickly, "said Simon Pendleton, lead author and PhD researcher at INSTAAR (Arctic Research Institute and Alpine Skiing).

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Baffin is the fifth largest island in the worlddominated by long and deep fjords separated by high plateaus and bas-reliefs. The thin, cold ice of the shelf acts as a kind of natural cold room, which keeps the moss and ancient lichens in their original growth position for millennia.

"We are traveling to the margins of the receding ice, we take samples of newly exposed plants preserved in these ancient landscapes and we dated them with carbon to get a sense of when the ice was last coming to this place, "Pendleton said. Because dead plants are effectively removed from the landscape, the radiocarbon age of rooted plants defines the last time the summers were as hot, on average, as those of the last century. "

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In August, researchers collected 48 plant samples from 30 different layers of ice in Baffin, covering a range of altitudes and exposures. They also took quartz samples from each site to further establish the age and history of the landscape ice cover.

Once the samples were processed and the radiocarbon went back to the INSTAAR labs of CU Boulder and the University of California at Irvine, the researchers found that these ancient plants in the 30 layers of ice were probably covered with ice for at least 40,000 years.

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"Unlike biology, which has spent the last three billion years developing systems to avoid the impacts of climate change, glaciers do not have a survival strategysaid Gifford Miller, lead author of the research and professor of geological sciences at CU Boulder. They behave well, reacting directly to summer temperatures. If the summers are hot, they retire immediately; If summers are cool, they move forward. "

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Compared with temperature data reconstructed from Baffin ice cores and Greenland, the results suggest that Modern temperatures represent the hottest century for the region for 115,000 years and Baffin could be totally free of ice in the next centuries.

"Normally, you expect to see different ages of plants in different topographic conditions," Pendleton said. "A place at high altitude could keep your ice cream longer, for example. the magnitude of the warming is such that everything melts now everywhere. We have never seen anything as pronounced as this before, "said Pendleton.

How is Baffin Island the fate of the Arctic that could be completely ice-free?

(Source: DPA)