Antarctica is considered one of the Earth’s largest, most pristine remaining wildernesses.
Antarctica is considered one of the Earth’s largest, most pristine remaining wildernesses. Yet since its formal discovery 200 years ago, the continent has seen accelerating and potentially impactful human activity.
How widespread this activity is across the continent has never been quantified. We know Antarctica has no cities, agriculture or industry. But we have never had a good idea of where humans have been, how much of the continent remains untouched or largely unimpacted, and to what extent these largely unimpacted areas serve to protect biodiversity.
A team of researchers led by Monash University, including Dr Bernard Coetzee from the Global Change Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits University), has changed all of that. Using a data set of 2.7 million human activity records, the team showed just how extensive human use of Antarctica has been over the last 200 years. The research was published in the journal Nature.
With the exception of some large areas mostly in the central parts of the continent, humans have set foot almost everywhere.
Read more at University of the Witwatersrand
Photo Credit: jcrane via Pixabay
