The Antarctic Peninsula, like many polar regions, is warming faster than the global average, with extreme heat events in Antarctica becoming more common.

The new study — by the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire, and the British Antarctic Survey — used satellite data to assess how much the Antarctic Peninsula has been “greening” in response to climate change.

It found that the area of vegetation cover across the Peninsula increased from less than one square kilometre in 1986 to almost 12 square kilometres by 2021.

Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study also found this greening trend accelerated by over 30% in recent years (2016-2021) relative to the full study period (1986-2021) — expanding by over 400,000 square metres per year in this period.

In a previous study, which examined core samples taken from moss-dominated ecosystems on the Antarctic Peninsula, the team found evidence that rates of plant growth had increased dramatically in recent decades.

This new study uses satellite imagery to confirm that a widespread greening trend, across the Antarctic Peninsula, is under way and accelerating.

“The plants we find on the Antarctic Peninsula — mostly mosses — grow in perhaps the harshest conditions on Earth,” said Dr Thomas Roland, from the University of Exeter.

“The landscape is still almost entirely dominated by snow, ice and rock, with only a tiny fraction colonised by plant life.

“But that tiny fraction has grown dramatically — showing that even this vast and isolated ‘wilderness’ is being affected by anthropogenic climate change.”

Dr Olly Bartlett, from the University of Hertfordshire, added: “As these ecosystems become more established — and the climate continues to warm — it’s likely that the extent of greening will increase.

“Soil in Antarctica is mostly poor or non-existent, but this increase in plant life will add organic matter, and facilitate soil formation — potentially paving the way for other plants to grow.

“This raises the risk of non-native and invasive species arriving, possibly carried by eco-tourists, scientists or other visitors to the continent.”

The researchers emphasise the urgent need for further research to establish the specific climate and environmental mechanisms that are driving the “greening” trend.

“The sensitivity of the Antarctic Peninsula’s vegetation to climate change is now clear and, under future anthropogenic warming, we could see fundamental changes to the biology and landscape of this iconic and vulnerable region,” said Dr Roland.

He added: “Our findings raise serious concerns about the environmental future of the Antarctic Peninsula, and of the continent as a whole. In order to protect Antarctica, we must understand these changes and identify precisely what is causing them.”

The researchers are now investigating how recently deglaciated (ice-free) landscapes are colonised by plants, and how the process might proceed into the future.

Some of these environmental phenols are known to have cardiac toxicities. Now, an interdisciplinary study involving four University of Cincinnati College of Medicine professors is revealing their adverse impact on the heart’s electrical properties, and the research has been published in the journal Environmental Health.

“This is the first study to look at the impact of phenol exposure on cardiac electrical activity in humans,” said Hong-Sheng Wang, PhD, professor in the Department of Pharmacology, Physiology and Neurobiology and the study’s lead author.

Researchers used data from the Fernald Community Cohort, which includes nearly 10,000 people who lived near the former U.S. Department of Energy uranium processing site at Fernald, outside Cincinnati, and participated in the Fernald Medical Monitoring Program between 1990 and 2008.

Much of the cohort did not experience exposure to uranium beyond the radiation received by the general population. Wang and his team used their data, including biological samples and medical records, in the study so uranium exposure would not be a factor in the findings — making them relevant to the general population. Because urine samples and electrocardiograms, or EKGs, were collected on the same day, the results were significant for analyzing exposure to environmental phenols.

The EKGs, which measure cardiac electrical activities, were read by board-certified physicians, and the urine samples were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for exposure analysis.

One goal of the study was to identify any changes in EKG parameters associated with environmental phenol exposure.

The heart is driven by electrical activity, so anything affecting its electrical properties can have a detrimental impact and possibly result in arrhythmias.

The research concluded higher exposure to some environmental phenols is associated with altered cardiac electrical activity.

Researchers found higher exposure to BPA, BPF and BPA+F in women is associated with a longer PR interval, a delay in the time it takes for electrical signals to move from the atria at the top of the heart to the ventricles.

“Our findings were highly sex-specific,” said Wang. In women, researchers identified an association with longer QRS duration, or contraction of the ventricles, and dysfunction of the electrical impulses of the heart.

“It was particularly pronounced in women with higher body mass indexes,” said Wang.

In men, researchers found higher exposure to triclocarban (TCC), an antimicrobial agent, led to longer QT intervals in the heart — meaning the heart’s electrical system is taking too long to recharge, a situation that can contribute to heart rhythm dysfunction. TCC has since been banned in the United States.

Wang also pointed out that typical exposure levels alone are unlikely to cause clinically significant heart disease in healthy people.

“These were not dramatic changes that we observed, but moderate changes to cardiac electrical activity,” he said. “However, they were particularly pronounced in certain subpopulations.”

He said the altered cardiac activity could exacerbate existing heart disease or arrhythmias in a patient, especially older adults or those with other risk factors.

“Now there are new chemicals out there, so the next step would be to examine these newer environmental chemicals and to focus on their impact on an individual level in those who are predisposed to heart disease,” said Wang.

Other contributors in this study included Susan Pinney, PhD, FACE, professor of epidemiology in the Department of Environmental and Public Health Sciences; Jack Rubinstein, MD, FACC, professor of clinical cardiology in the Department of Internal Medicine; and Changchun Xie, PhD, professor in the Department of Biostatistics, Health Informatics and Data Sciences.

This study was funded by grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health and the University of Cincinnati Center for Environmental Genetics.

A team of astronomers led by University of Arizona researchers has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to obtain some of the most detailed insights into the forces that shape protoplanetary disks. The observations offer glimpses into what our solar system may have looked like 4.6 billion years ago.

Specifically, the team was able to trace so-called disk winds in unprecedented detail. These winds are streams of gas blowing from the planet-forming disk out into space. Powered largely by magnetic fields, these winds can travel tens of miles in just one second. The researchers’ findings, published in Nature Astronomy, help astronomers better understand how young planetary systems form and evolve.

According to the paper’s lead author, Ilaria Pascucci, a professor at the U of A’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, one of the most important processes at work in a protoplanetary disk is the star eating matter from its surrounding disk, which is known as accretion.

“How a star accretes mass has a big influence on how the surrounding disk evolves over time, including the way planets form later on,” Pascucci said. “The specific ways in which this happens have not been understood, but we think that winds driven by magnetic fields across most of the disk surface could play a very important role.”

Young stars grow by pulling in gas from the disk that’s swirling around them, but in order for that to happen, gas must first shed some of its inertia. Otherwise, the gas would consistently orbit the star and never fall onto it. Astrophysicists call this process “losing angular momentum,” but how exactly that happens has proved elusive.

To better understand how angular momentum works in a protoplanetary disk, it helps to picture a figure skater on the ice: Tucking her arms alongside her body will make her spin faster, while stretching them out will slow down her rotation. Because her mass doesn’t change, the angular momentum remains the same.

For accretion to occur, gas across the disk has to shed angular momentum, but astrophysicists have a hard time agreeing on how exactly this happens. In recent years, disk winds have emerged as important players funneling away some gas from the disk surface — and with it, angular momentum — which allows the leftover gas to move inward and ultimately fall onto the star.

Because there are other processes at work that shape protoplanetary disks, it is critical to be able to distinguish between the different phenomena, according to the paper’s second author, Tracy Beck at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute.

While material at the inner edge of the disk is pushed out by the star’s magnetic field in what is known as X-wind, the outer parts of the disk are eroded by intense starlight, resulting in so-called thermal winds, which blow at much slower velocities.

“To distinguish between the magnetic field-driven wind, the thermal wind and X-wind, we really needed the high sensitivity and resolution of JWST (the James Webb Space Telescope),” Beck said.

Unlike the narrowly focused X-wind, the winds observed in the present study originate from a broader region that would include the inner, rocky planets of our solar system — roughly between Earth and Mars. These winds also extend farther above the disk than thermal winds, reaching distances hundreds of times the distance between Earth and the sun.

“Our observations strongly suggest that we have obtained the first images of the winds that can remove angular momentum and solve the longstanding problem of how stars and planetary systems form,” Pascucci said.

For their study, the researchers selected four protoplanetary disk systems, all of which appear edge-on when viewed from Earth.

“Their orientation allowed the dust and gas in the disk to act as a mask, blocking some of the bright central star’s light, which otherwise would have overwhelmed the winds,” said Naman Bajaj, a graduate student at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who contributed to the study.

By tuning JWST’s detectors to distinct molecules in certain states of transition, the team was able to trace various layers of the winds. The observations revealed an intricate, three-dimensional structure of a central jet, nested inside a cone-shaped envelope of winds originating at progressively larger disk distances, similar to the layered structure of an onion. An important new finding, according to the researchers, was the consistent detection of a pronounced central hole inside the cones, formed by molecular winds in each of the four disks.

Next, Pascucci’s team hopes to expand these observations to more protoplanetary disks, to get a better sense of how common the observed disk wind structures are in the universe and how they evolve over time.

“We believe they could be common, but with four objects, it’s a bit difficult to say,” Pascucci said. “We want to get a larger sample with James Webb, and then also see if we can detect changes in these winds as stars assemble and planets form.”