Introduction – Most part of Earth is being covered with ice i.e. about 70 percent but with the present climate condition of environment melting of ice is being observed in so many places. Researchers are describing rise in temperature resulted in bringing the mosses to light due to melting of ice and the temperatures in frosted places are the warmest they have not experienced from thousands of years.
Research – They were stunned and as paleoclimatologists, they studied ancient climate. Islands covered with ice were defrosting because of planet’s warmness and the team of researchers are now probing the plants unburied by this defrosting. They have collected an impressive number of samples and their findings were enthralling which displayed the indication that humans are exceeding the climate into a new reign.
Researchers want to know the growth and retreat of islands ice cover and for this they have been hunting remains of scraggly mosses along the edges of the island’s retreating ice sheets. The newly exposed mosses are dead but then they come alive again and termed as zombie by one of the researcher. By using the radiocarbon dating technique they can estimate when they were last exposed to sunlight and processes photosynthesis process.
Structure – The carbon component in some elements have the same number of protons but different masses and each of these is a different isotope. And one of them carbon 14v is radioactive and it has a life of about 5,730 years. After certain period half of the carbon-14 atoms in the original sample will have decayed into a new isotope.
Radiocarbon dating compares the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in some sample. The ratio changes as carbon-14 decays and the ratio corresponds to when the mosses was last alive. This technique won’t work for older objects like 45,000 to 50,000 years and the radiocarbon would have decayed.
Conclusion – Researchers collected around more than 370 different plant samples collected on the island. Group are formed due to cluster of them from ages and each represents a time when the ice stretches across the island to entomb the affected plants. The mosses found were mostly dead because of the absence of radio carbon. The magnitude of summer shows an evidence of melting of ice is much evidential at large.
