Antarctica: Scientists set up station on the Whillans Ice Stream
Antarctica is the world’s fifth and southernmost continent. For decades it has attracted only the most daring of adventurers, with John Davis, the American Captain, believed to have been the first person to set foot there in 1821.
Since then, an altogether different kind of traveller has frequented Antarctica: the scientist. They make the arduous journey to study the planet and find out things about climate change, microorganisms, endangered animals, and unusual flora.
This latter aspect of Antarctica is today extremely rare — there are only two types of plant — though recent research suggests the continent was once filled with exotic flora and was, in fact, the site of a tropical rainforest.
READ MORE Antarctica’s 100 underground volcanoes could spark ‘rapid’ flooding of globe
The Antarctica of today is almost inhabitable, and while between 1,000 and 5,000 people currently live there, they are mostly stuck in their secure outposts studying and researching their findings. And while some 230 native species call Antarctica home, they have spent thousands of years adapting to the harsh climate.
When Dr Johann Klages and his team set out for Antarctica in 2020 they were not looking for the snow, the ice, or the cold. They were searching for an altogether different Antarctica. He and his team, from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, found what they were looking for, something which was explored during the science journal Nature’s short documentary, ‘An Ancient Antarctic Rainforest’.
Piercing deep beneath the ice’s surface, the scientists found evidence for a long-forgotten network of plants — and not just any ordinary plants.
“[Some] 90 million years ago, a temperate rainforest existed in West Antarctica only 900 kilometres away from the South Pole,” explained Dr Klages.
A special drill, used to extract a core of material around 30 metres into the sea floor, discovered that the yearly mean temperate of a stretch of western Atlantic coastline was once 12C.
While it may not sound warm, it would have been enough to see the landscape transform into a swampy rainforest.
“When we recovered the core, we could already see what was inside and that it was very unusual,” said Dr Klages. “And therefore we decided to scan them in a CT scanner back home.”
Don’t miss…
UK, Chile and Argentina all claim to own beautiful island with very amusing name[REPORT]
World’s most dangerous sea daring cruise ship tourists pay £5k to cross twice[LATEST]
The tiny towns 7,000 miles from the UK where all the locals speak Welsh[INSIGHT]
- Support fearless journalism
- Read The Daily Express online, advert free
- Get super-fast page loading
The team created a visualisation of a lengthy green and yellow thread showing the various properties identified within the material pulled from the ice.
They found sandstone and within that a network of fossil roots, and, as Dr Klages noted: “We can nicely see how the roots are connected with each other and are pristinely preserved.
“We have thin roots, we have thick roots, and it’s really a network as you would go to the forest near you and drill into the current forest.”
Further analysis of fossilised pollen and spores helped to paint an even greater picture of what Antarctica once looked like, revealing “a very warm temperature for this latitude, and annual mean temperatures that are similar to those of Northern Italy”.
“It would be very certain that also dinosaurs and insects lived in that environment, and in an environment that was dark for about four months during the year because we have the polar night,” he added.
When Antarctica was like this, the Earth was the hottest it had ever been. Carbon dioxide levels, released from ancient air preserved in ice, burst into the air and were at much higher levels than they are today.
While the discovery may seem abstract, its finding is extremely important in efforts to understand what might happen because of man-made climate change, and what a hotter Earth may look like.
Source: Read Full Article