A strong wind can be a dangerous thing-sometimes it is powerful enough to knock you off your feet.But to plants,the wind is a source of new life,carrying them or their spores thousands of miles. A NASA satellite called QuikSCAT has discovered highways of wind over the Earth's oceans.Scientists believe these invisible roads may explain why many nonflowering plants,such as mosses and lichens ,grow where they do. The satellite is able to send microwaves from space to the surface of the ocean.The pattern of signals that come back shows which way the winds are blowing. Using this  _ , the scientists studied a group of islands in the southern hemisphere ,near Antarctica.Winds tend to blow anticlockwise in this region,but there are lots of local differences. When the researchers compared these local patterns to botanical data,they found that the wind had an important effect on where species of mosses,lichens,and other nonflowering plants grow. For example,Bouvet Island and Heard Island,share 30 percent of their moss species,29 percent of liverworts ,and 32 percent of lichens-even though they are 4,430 kilometers apart.In contrast,Gough Island and Bouvet Island,separated by just 1,860 kilometers of sea,share only 16 percent of mosses and 17 percent of liverworts.They have no lichens in common. Ferns and flowering plants don't travel as well in the wind,so they don't show the same kinds of distribution patterns. This story is about_.
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