Researchers hope to monitor Antarctic vegetation remotely

Sharon Robinson, a Professor in the School of Earth, Atmospheric and Life Sciences – University of Wollongong of Earth, Atmospheric and Life Sciences at the University of Wollongong and Deputy Director of Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Futures, and a 2024 Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow, aiming to implement a whole-of-continent observing system for Antarctica to understand how the continent responds to climate change.

“Soon after I had arrived in Australia from England in the early Nineties, I gave a conference presentation asking why some rainforest plants make their new leaves red rather than green. Somebody came up to me after my talk and said, “If you’re interested in plants that go red, you should go and work on the mosses in Antarctica.”

It made sense. I’d been trying to determine the extent those red pigments are produced because of high UV stress. And I realised that Antarctica would be a really good place to test because this was when the ozone hole was really big. So I wrote a grant proposal – and got it.

From the moment I arrived I became totally enthralled with the question of how the animals and plants survive under those extreme conditions. I’ve been 14 times now, and every time I’m worried that it’s not going to be as special. But it’s always awe-inspiring.

It’s the sheer size – the ice just goes on forever. And there’s nothing – no people, no buildings. And the colours – I expected it to be totally white, but there’s the brilliant blue of the sea, and the yellows and pinks and purples of the sky because the solar angle is so low.

The beauty of the Antarctic is quite scary

When you see the beauty of the place, it makes you really think about the consequences of our actions. It’s quite scary.

You can see the changes, especially on the peninsula. Where once you’d find valleys previously full of ice, they’re now bare earth. It’s mind-blowing seeing climate change in action so starkly.

We know from our observations that the magnificent moss beds are more stressed than when we started working there. There’s more than 100 species of mosses there. The ones we mostly work on are near the Australian Antarctic Base at Casey – large expanses of moss turf that survive under snow for about ten months of the year, through the deep of winter.

On one of my first trips down there, one of the tradies on the base asked us how old it was, and we couldn’t answer that question. But we wanted to try and understand.

Mosses don’t have tree rings to date them. So we thought we’d try to use radiocarbon in the atmosphere – to find the peak in the mid 1960s when the atmospheric nuclear testing was at its peak. We found that some were more than 100 years old – yet they are only centimetres tall. The tallest we’ve found so far were just 14cm. Yet they’re like ancient forests.

Inside the moss turf you’ve got invertebrate animals like tardigrades and nematodes surviving, along with the fungi and algae and bacteria. It’s a whole community – the moss even acts like a cushion to allow the vascular plants like the grass seeds to germinate, to enable the colonisation of the newly exposed soil.

How do mosses survive? Like any other plant, they take in carbon dioxide and photosynthesize – they need light for that, obviously, and in the summer they’ve got light for 24 hours, which is a bonus. Because they’re so small, and sheltered in between rocks, they’re able to use their dark pigmentation to soak up the Sun’s rays.

In the summer the air temperature will be one or two degrees, but the mosses will be over 20˚C, which is when they’re at their happiest. If they’ve got water and they’re warm in the Sun, they’re able to photosynthesize really well.

But the actual nutrients they absorb comes from ancient penguin poo. Between 5000 and 8000 years ago, these areas were the sites of penguin colonies; as the ice retreated, the lands bounced up with isostatic uplift, and the penguins moved down to the coast to nest closer to the water. But they left their guano behind, and it’s been freeze-dried for millennia.

If we’re lucky, we might get down there for a few weeks in the summer season. In the last few years, there’s been a number of heatwaves, and almost inevitably, they happen when we’re not there. The idea behind my ARC laureate is to have systems in place where we can monitor the vegetation, hopefully in real time, and have data that comes back through the whole year.

If you walk on the moss, you’re obviously treading on 100-year-old ecosystems, and that’s destructive. We’re also trying to devise techniques to monitor the vegetation remotely, with the use of drones and sensors, so it has the least impact.

One of the big issues with Antarctica’s remoteness is the expense in sending data back in real time. If they’re very large files, you want to be able to do the processing in place and then just send back the important things, so you’re not clogging up the bandwidth of the satellites.

One of the other main aspects of the ARC grant is to employ modern technology using artificial intelligence to decide what data to send back. Hopefully, some of the outcomes from that will be translatable to other remote areas in Australia and around the world as well.

Antarctica melting isn’t an abstract idea. It will become sea-level rise, it will become storm surges, and it threaten beach communities all around the world. If we don’t protect it now, Antarctica is going to come for us.”

This article was published in Cosmosmagazine.com