Ancient Rainforest in Antarctic During Mid-Cretaceous

South Pole During Mid-Cretaceous

A new discovery suggests that around 90 million years ago, which was known as the mid-Cretaceous Period (115-80 million years ago), there was a rainforest near the South Pole which is commonly known as Antarctic.

A team of scientists from Europe unearthed forest soil by drilling into the seabed near the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in Western part of Antarctica. The unearthed soil was collected from a particular core of sediment whose one section caught attention with its unusual colour. They CT scanned the section of the core and discovered a dense network of fossil roots. They extracted the preserved roots, pollen and spores from the soil and analyse them. The report shows that the world at that time was a lot warmer than previously thought.

During mid-Cretaceous, the temperatures in the tropical areas are very high. It might be around 35 degrees Celsius. For the past 140 million years it was the warmest period. However, very little was known about the Antarctic Circle environment so far. This discovery of a temperate rainforest in the region also raising a question that how the entire ecosystem runs there as one third of every year there was no life giving sunlight at all.

Now the existence of the temperate rainforest suggesting average temperatures were at least around 12 degrees Celsius. It means, during mid-Cretaceous there was likely to be no ice at the South Pole. Even during the absence of Sun, these swampy temperate rainforests were able to grow. This strongly suggesting that the world of mid-Cretaceous had even warmer climate than we expected earlier.

Antarctica without Ice Cover