The Antarctic Peninsula is an early warning system for the southernmost continent when it comes to climate change. And the prognostications are grim — but it’s not yet too late to avoid irreversible changes, researchers report February 20 in Frontiers in Environmental Science.
In the new study, the team first documented how the peninsula is already transforming as the planet warms, and then assessed how different amounts of warming by 2100 could alter the peninsula’s fate, including its marine and terrestrial ecosystems, land and sea ice, ice shelves and extreme weather events. Those global warming estimates — of 1.8, 3.6 and 4.4 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial times —