Erik Gulbranson, a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, working in the Antarctic. Credit: Peter Rejcek, NSF
Posted on 05/23/2015 12:10:22 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Sometime about 220 million years ago, a meandering stream flowed here and plants grew along its banks. Something, as yet unknown, caused sediment to flood the area rapidly, which helped preserve the plants. Gulbranson splits open a grey slab of siltstone in the quarry to reveal amazingly well-preserved Triassic plant fossils, as if the leaves and stems had been freshly pressed into the rock only yesterday.
"It's a mixture of plants that don't exist anymore," he says, "but we have some plants in these fossil ecosystems that we might know today, like ginkgo."
On the one end are fossils from an extinct genus of fork-leaved seed ferns called Dicroidium that dominated during the Triassic, a geologic period that lasted from about 252 to 200 million years ago. Other plants frozen in time on this remote hillside include species in the extant cycad family, which today favor subtropical and tropical climates.
Even better are the fossilized specimens no one can yet identify.
"They're brand new to Antarctica," said Gulbranson, who is co-principal investigator on a project investigating the evolution of ancient plants in Antarctica and the high-latitude environments in which they grew.
Also new to Antarctica: A Triassic-age fossil forest of 37 tree stumps, located less than a couple of kilometers almost directly south from the quarry.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Erik Gulbranson, a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, working in the Antarctic. Credit: Peter Rejcek, NSF
In before the trolls!
Have Ping, Will Travel.
Speaking for all of the other trolls: I’m offended.
By the way... 37 tree stumps makes a forest?
Scientists have absolutely noah idea what might have happened.
Well, technically, a former forest.
Since those rocks are dated at 220 million years old, there's noah-way ark-eologists can imagine a biblical scenario for them.
It is the consensus of scientists that the warm period in Antarctica was a direct result of 22nd century man’s ability to ship greenhouse gases back in time, it was announced by IPCC’s 127th annual We Have Only Five Years Left symposium
Well, no. They're brand new to you.
Antarctica is known for its ignorance.
/bingo
Ironically, ANTarctica is one of the places where there are no ants.
http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2012/04/polar-ants.html
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