Our current position is: 67 degrees 34' south, 68 degrees 08' west
From: Erwin Jackson - Campaigner
17th February 1997
Last Tuesday, we visited Rothera, the UK's main centre of operation on the Antarctic Peninsula. The station was just at the end of its summer season and a lot of people are packing their bags - or at least thinking about it. The overwintering crowd stays here for two and a half years - some told us they came here in December 1994!! Others, especially the scientists, stay only for the summer to do their field work, taking their samples and data back to Cambridge for analysis. The seventy or so people at the station gave us a very warm welcome, and because they had a dock to tie up to, for a day and a half people could visit us freely (and vice versa!).
For a number of years scientists have been seeing signs that increasing temperature has been effecting Antarctica's plants. One of the best documented cases of this has been recorded by British researchers, who have reported that on the Argentine Islands, Antarctic Peninsula, the Antarctic pearlwort has increased five-fold and the Antarctic hairgrass 25-fold in the last 30 years. Temperatures at the nearby Ukrainian Vernadsky station (formerly UK's Faraday) have increased by around 1.4 C over the same period and scientists believe this has favoured the reproduction of these flowering plants.
So far the official version - and it might seem odd that Greenpeace is worried about there being too MANY plants. But as yet another sign of change in Antarctica, it fits into the mosaic of the signals of climate change we are finding on this trip. During our visit to Rothera--further south from Vernadsky--we spent a morning on nearby Leonie Island talking to British and Dutch botonists about their plant research, staring at little patches of grass and moss as if they were about to bite us. Dr David Walton, head of BAS's terrestrial and life sciences division, told us that in his thirty years Antarctic experience he had seen the retreat of glaciers, the thinning of sea ice and an explosion in the populations of plant species.