Land within the Arctic circle is likely to experience explosive "greening" in the next few decades as grass, shrubs and trees thrive in soil stripped of ice and permafrost by global warming, a study said on Sunday.

Wooded areas in the Arctic could increase by as much as 52 percent by the 2050s as the so-called tree line, the maximum latitude at which trees can grow, shifts hundreds of kilometers north, according to computer simulations published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Such widespread redistribution of Arctic vegetation would have impacts that reverberate through the global ecosystem," said Richard Pearson of the American Museum of Natural History's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation.

The Arctic has become one of the world's 'hotspots' for global warming. "These impacts would extend far beyond the Arctic region," Pearson said in a statement.

In a separate study also published on Sunday, Dutch scientists said that ice shelves in Antarctica have in fact been growing due to global warming.

Meltwater that runs off the Antarctic mainland provides a cold, protective "cap" for ice shelves because it comes from freshwater, which is denser than seawater, the team from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute said.

Ice shelves are the floating blankets of ice that extend from the coast. They are fed by glaciers that move ice down from the ice sheet and toward the sea.

The freshwater acts as a cold coating for the underside of the ice shelf, cocooning it from warmer seas, according to their study, appearing in the journal Nature Geoscience.

This would explain an apparent anomaly: why sea ice around Antarctica has been growing, reaching the greatest-ever recorded extent in 2010, it suggested.

AFP