A New Year, a New Project!

The New Year is bringing some new adventures for our research team in 2022. We are starting a new research project in Antarctica! 

The topic of this new project is how the ecosystem changes and develops as glaciers melt. Warmer temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have caused ice to melt. For glaciers on land, that melt happens at the edges of the glaciers, and they shrink in size. That's called "retreating". (They're not actually walking backwards. It's just that the edge of glacier moves backwards as it melts.) As glaciers retreat, the ground that was once covered in thick ice is now exposed. That soil being uncovered hasn't seen the light of day for thousands of years!

Not much can live on or in soil beneath a glacier. Not only do glaciers block the light, they also slowly move downhill with gravity. That big, heavy hunk of ice moving downhill scrapes the ground beneath it. (That is called "scouring".) It's hard to be a plant when you're covered by thick ice that's slowly scraping you away from the soil! So under a glacier, plants and many animals can't survive. But once the glacier retreats, that exposed soil can start to grow new life. Now they have sunlight and can take root! This is the beginning of a new ecosystem growing where the glacier once stood.

This video shows the melt occurring at the edge of a glacier in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. Melt happens every summer, but if melt is faster than ice is being added, the edge of the glacier will start to move backwards and retreat. That exposes the bare soil that was once beneath the glacier.

The ecosystem that grows on the newly exposed soil changes over time. Think about, say, a forest or grassland near where you live. If a fire came through and removed all of the plants and animals, the ecosystem will slowly start to regrow. It doesn't immediately turn into the same forest that lived there before the fire. At first, some very brave plants can grow in that desolate area, but eventually more plants and new trees will grow, and the animals can return. It can take decades before it once again looks like the forest that once stood there. That is called ecological succession. 

The same thing happens in Antarctica. The first, brave plants to colonize the bare soil will pave the way for more plants and animals, and it will slowly change over decades to become a mature ecosystem. They won't turn into a forest with trees, of course, because trees no longer live in Antarctica. But these bare soils might one day look like the rest of the ecosystem that our team has studied in the past.

The mature ecosystem on King George Island, Antarctica.

We know a lot about how succession happens in the ecosystems where we live. We are pretty good at predicting what a forest would look like as it changes over time. That's because we've lived in those ecosystems for centuries and have watched what happens after fires and other disturbances for a long time. People have not been watching Antarctica for centuries, though. People have only been there for about 100 years total, and only now are we seeing rapid changes like climate change. So, we don't yet know exactly how the ecosystem will change and develop after glaciers melt. 

That is what our research project will be measuring. We are going to study the newly exposed soil at the face of glaciers that have been melting. We will look at how the plant and animal communities have changed over the years after the glacier has retreated, and we will ask why they have changed in that way. But more on that later!