I'm very fortunate to be able to continue the research of many giants who have come before me, collecting over 500 samples of moss from beds located at ASPA135 and Robinsons Ridge in the Windmill Islands region of East Antarctica in February 2022.

I am analysing these samples in the lab to determine which species are present and which are absent at known locations which are to be remeasured every ~5 years.

As you can see in the figure presented here, in the past Ceratodon purpureus wasn't found in wet areas like puddles formed by snow melt, however we now see C. purpureus were puddles used to be. This tells us that those areas were persistently dry in the study period, another example of the drying trend in East Antarctica.

Read the Nature Climate Change article that tells the story of the first 13 years of this study here: Rapid change in East Antarctic terrestrial vegetation in response to regional drying

There is also an article in The Conversation which tells this story in a more accessable tone: Antarctica's 'moss forests' are drying and dying