“These birds are good indicators of the health of this ecosystem,”
Patterson adds, weighing another white fluff ball of a chick. “But if we
let them go extinct because we don’t value them, what does that tell us
about our own species?”
HARM TOHAIRGRASS
It is not just Antarctica’s bird and animal species that are seeing cli-
mate-driven shifts in population and dominance, however.
Tad Day is a sandy-haired, boyish, 39-year-old professor from Arizona
State University, who drives his Mark 3 Zodiac as if it was a Formula One
race car. He has also spent years studying Antarctica’s only two flowering
plants, hairgrass and pearlwort. The main study site he and his
“Sundevils” use is Stepping Stone Island, a surprisingly green, rocky isle
several miles south of Palmer around the rough chop of Bonaparte Point.
“Step” is surrounded by pale blue icebergs, a rumbling blue-white
glacier, and other rocky islands and outcroppings—including Biscoe
Point to the south, which, with the retreat of the Marr Glacier, has now
become Biscoe Island. Amidst nesting giant petrels and a friendly skua
named “Yogi,” Day maintains two gardens, fenced to keep fur seals
out, containing over ninety wire plant frames surrounding banks of
hairgrass and pearlwort growing not in true soil, but a close approxi-
mation made up of glacial sand and guano.
Here Day has found that warming improves the growth of pearl-
wort but appears to have a negative impact on hairgrass. Once the
dominant species in Antarctica, hairgrass is now being displaced by
pearlwort, a mosslike plant.
“Global warming,” Day explains, “has the capacity to shift the com-
petitive balance of species in ways that, until we get out there and do
the research, we don’t understand yet, and that could have important
consequences on our ability to produce food and fiber.”
Increasingly reliable climate models now predict a 3 to 9° planetary
warming this century. This will result in shifts in agricultural produc-
tion, spread of tropical insects and diseases, increases in extreme
weather events, more intense coastal storms and hurricanes, erosion of
beaches, coral bleaching, and rising sea levels.
168 David Helvarg