Puerto Williams on the island of Navarino, separated from the South American mainland through the Beagle Channel, is the southernmost city in the world.
Far from the pollutants that plague the gigantic urban and commercial centers, it is a paradise that offers exclusive situations to global warming.
“There is no other place like this,” said Ricardo Rozzi, director of the Cape Horn International Center for Global Change Studies and Biocultural Conservation in Puerto Williams.
It is “a climate change sensitive position” because average temperatures exceed five degrees Celsius.
This cold and windy is the last inhabited southern frontier before reaching Antarctica.
Omora Ethnobotanical Park is home to an immense variety of lichens, mosses and fungi that scientists squat through with magnifying glasses.
In the crystalline River Snook, tiny organisms act as sentinels of the adjustments produced by global warming.
In the park as in the river, alarm bells ring.
Mosses and lichens in motion
At that latitude, 55 degrees south, climate change has an exponential effect on flora that responds to low temperatures, said Rozzi, 61.
“The biggest likelihood of climate change is emerging temperatures,” he said.
“These lichens survive” if a safe threshold is exceeded.
To escape the high temperatures, they move.
“In the case of the (mosses), we detected that they moved. Before they were between 50 and 350 (meters above sea level) and now they are between a hundred and 400,” Rozzi said.
He says Omora has more diversity consistent with the square meter of lichens and mosses than anywhere else in the world.
They also absorb carbon dioxide.
Another is the elevation diversity gradient, an ecological style in which biodiversity adjusts with altitude.
The biodiversity of Cerro Bandera, 700 meters high, rises every two hundred meters and there is a large temperature difference of 1. 5 degrees Celsius between the highest and lowest part.
“We can see the adjustments that exist in the high mountains and in the domain near the sea from a very short distance, and we can see how the temperature affects the biodiversity that lives in this river,” Tamara Contador, 38, biologist. at the Cape Horn International Centre, he told AFP.
She the gradients themselves.
If the height difference between the gradients increases or decreases on the mountain, scientists can do so if there has been a general change in temperature.
They say there has been.
Avoiding “extermination”
“Globally, polar and subpolar ecosystems are the most affected by climate replenishment, so we are in a position where climate replenishment has a much greater effect on biodiversity than positions,” Contador said.
River organizations are also of the alert system.
“The organisms that are here are also signs of water quality and global environmental changes,” Contador added.
River organisms are moving and have already improved their reproductive cycle, Rozzi says. This confirms that there has been a small climate change in the region that could have been much greater on the planet.
“Some insects that have an annual cycle from eggs to larvae and at adulthood now have two cycles, the temperature has increased,” Rozzi said.
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