One of the world’s most pristine places is being rapidly altered by climate change, according to a new study.
Heard Island, in the sub-Antarctic region, is a remote wildlife haven, home to seals, penguins, albatrosses and many other creatures. The UNESCO World Heritage-listed site has an active volcano called Big Ben towering over 2,745 metres high.
Although no humans have visited since 2016, the island recently made headlines as one of the destinations hit with a 10 percent tariff by US President Donald Trump.
A paper published in The Cryosphere has reported that around 64 square kilometres of the island’s glaciers have melted since 1947. The research was conducted by the Monash University-led Australian Research Council (ARC) research centre Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF).
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"Heard Island is one of the last wild places on Earth – an ice-shrouded volcano in the middle of the Southern Ocean,” says Professor Andrew Mackintosh, head of the school of earth, atmosphere and environment at Monash University in Australia. This wildlife haven, he adds, is “untouched by people but not untouched by the climate crisis.”
The researchers put this ice loss down to global warming. “While Heard Island is just about as remote as it’s possible to be on Earth, it has still suffered profound consequences from climate warming, which is almost certainly due to rising greenhouse gas emissions in the 20th and 21st centuries,” says SAEF Research Fellow Dr. Levan Tielidze.
The scientists used satellite imagery and topographical maps from 1947 to see how the island has changed over time. "In just a few decades, glaciers like Stephenson have vanished from the shoreline, retreating inland to form new lagoons,” says Mackintosh. “It’s a dramatic transformation, and it’s happening faster than the global average.
As the icy landscape changes, it will impact many animals but exactly how it will affect them is yet to be seen. "We're only beginning to understand the ripple effects of glacial retreat,” he says. “It’s a story of opportunity for some species, and extinction risk for others."
What's happening here is a good indication of the shifts we can expect in other parts of the world, too. “Heard Island is a sentinel,” explains Mackintosh. “What happens here, in its pristine isolation, helps us understand what’s coming for the rest of the world.”
The melting of Heard Island’s glaciers is particularly concerning because of how remote the island is. “Even here, at the edge of the world, the fingerprints of global warming are unmistakable,” says Mackintosh. “This is an island untouched by human hands, yet it’s being reshaped by human emissions from half a world away.”
Find out more about the study: Glacier inventories reveal an acceleration of Heard Island glacier loss over recent decades
Top image: Three Bays Area, Heard Island, sub-Antarctic. Credit: Credit Steven Chown, Monash University
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