Remains of 90-million-year-old rainforest found near South Pole

UPI ^ | April 1, 2020 | By Brooks Hays

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Some 90 million years ago, a temperate rainforest grew near the South Pole. Scientists recovered fossil traces of the ancient rainforest from seafloor sediment cores collected near West Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier.

Seismic data suggested the sediment layer was unique, but researchers weren't expecting to find the remnants of a Cretaceous forest.

"The finding of this well preserved 'forest soil' layer was actually a lucky dip," researcher Ulrich Salzmann, professor of palaeoecology at the University of Northumbria in Britain, told UPI. "We did not know of the existence of this layer before."

Among the sediment layers, Salzmann and his research partners found roots, pollen, spores and the remains of flowering plants. Scientists were able to use the various plant remains to piece together a fuller picture of what exactly Antarctica's ancient forest looked like.

"This was a swampy forest, dominated by needle-leaved conifer trees with many ferns. The forest was a temperate -- not a tropical -- rainforest, similar to the forests found today in New Zealand," Salzmann said. "Summer temperatures averaged 19 degrees Celsius and water temperatures in rivers and swamps reached up to 20 degrees. This was despite a four-month polar night, meaning for a third of every year there was no life-giving sunlight at all."

Scientists estimate the polar rainforest persisted until the Oligocene epoch, before fragmenting some 20 million years ago. Pockets of rainforest likely remained viable until 10 million years ago.

Antarctica and the South Pole has moved a bit over the last 90 million years, but tectonic shifts don't account for the emergence and disappearance of the ancient Antarctic forest. The polar forest was made possible by climate change.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Oldeconomybuyer.

join or quit view topics view or post blog bookmark post new topic subscribe

[while not a follower of the Crustal Displacement model, the data is clear that Antarctica hasn't been an icebound desert for 30 million years]

Mechanics of Displacements
by Rand Flem-Ath

...the Antarctic beech trees are from two to three million years old. The point that was being made was that plate tectonics, as a theory, was incapable of explaining the existence of this forest so close to the South Pole a mere two to three million years ago. This is not to say that plate tectonics is wrong: it is simply insufficient on its own to account for these facts. At the slow pace of change demanded by plate tectonics the beech trees would have to be many millions (not just 2 or 3 million) of years old to be 200 miles from the South Pole. In other words, to account for the beech forest on Antarctica we need another whole Earth theory to explain the facts. Earth crust displacement is a complementary whole earth theory to plate tectonics that can account for these facts. We are not disputing the power of the plate tectonic theory: we are simply adding another set of lens with which the past might be viewed.

Spending Time and Wasting Space:
or how ice core dating went wrong
by Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson

What we find from the ice core dating is that Lesser Antarctica has been covered in ice for at least 122,000 years, if not more. But when we shift our attention to the opposite side of the globe and look at Siberia, Beringia and Alaska we do not find equivalent ice sheets. Instead we find evidence of many large mammals such as horses, bison and rhinoceros swarming over grasslands. How can one part of the globe be under ice for at least 122,000 years while the exact opposite of the globe has no ice and large mammals (dating from 11,000 to 70,000 carbon-14 years ago)? This does not compute. Either the evidence from the north is wrong or the evidence from the south is wrong.

• First Long-Necked Dinosaur Fossil Found In Antarctica [2011]
• Light Shed On South Pole Dinosaurs [2011]
• Fossilized pollen reveals climate history of northern Antarctica [2011]
• Antarctic Forests Reveal Ancient Trees [2004]
• Ancient Fungus 'Revived' In Lab (180-430,000K Years Old) [2004]
• The Eltanin Impact Crater [2004]
• Giant asteroid rocked Antarctica [2004]
• Antarctica 'Lost World' Found [2004]
• Antarctic Lost Worlds - 2 New Dinosaurs Species Found [2004]

[Hot Tabasco]

This was despite a four-month polar night, meaning for a third of every year there was no life-giving sunlight at all."

That's assuming the planet's rotation remained constant forever and its orbital path remained constant forever.

I don't believe either of the above were constant but rather over the millenia, the north and south poles were once not the poles and thus received the same amount of sunlight as the temperate climates these plants seemed to flourish in.......But what do I know

[FreeReign]

The forest wasn’t where it is now in space

Supposedly it was tacked on to Pangea probably around -45 latitude.

[rxsid]

"I was thinking the same thing...how’d it get so cold?"

And then warm...and then cool...and then warm...and then cool. All over our globe, over the eon's. It's an ever changing world we live in.

We should be thankful we live during such temperate times. Imagine, just ~400 years ago during the "Little Ice Age", most of the rivers and lakes in Europe were frozen.

How the Little Ice Age Changed History
By John Lanchester
March 25, 2019

It is easy to forget just how variable the climate of the earth has been, across the geologic time scale. That is partly because the extent of that variability is so difficult to imagine. A world entirely covered in ice, from pole to pole—the so-called snowball earth—is something we find it hard to get our heads around, even though the longest and oldest period of total or near-total glaciation, the Huronian glaciation, lasted for three hundred million years. A world without ice is also hard to visualize, though it is by comparison a much more recent phenomenon: perhaps only thirty-four million years ago, crocodiles swam in a freshwater lake we know as the North Pole, and palm trees grew in Antarctica. The reality is that our planet oscillates between phases with no ice, phases with all ice, and phases in the middle. The middle is where we happen to be right now—a fact that is responsible for our faulty perception of the earth’s climate as accommodating and stable.

In the roughly five thousand years of recorded human history, there has been one period in which we have had a real taste of our climate’s potential for moodiness, beginning around the start of the fourteenth century and lasting for hundreds of years. During this epoch, often known as the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped by as much as two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Compared with the extremes of snowball earth, that might not sound like much, but for people who lived through it the change was intensely dramatic.

...

[xp38]

I blame dinosaur farts

[cranked]

Meh, let me know when they find an alien base or ancient civilization there. *thumbsup*

[sanjuanbob]

Very nice report.
Thanks.

[Rurudyne]

More that you know.

It has been speculated that one of the reasons that the big herbivores got so big was that given the apparently poor quality of their food, that they didn’t chew in many cases, they used fermentation based digestion.

As with all fermentation processes the bigger the still the more efficient it is, so in this case it was a big efficient stomach ... which in turn means a big animal to house it.

Now, cows (who chew their food) use fermentation digestion and there are (relatively small compared to dinosaurs) cows that can sustain a flame ... just imagine what a big dinosaur could do?

[crusty old prospector]

I wouldn’t know where to begin. I would just suggest Wikipedia and a high school earth science class.

[ExGeeEye]

I keep telling people, “the globe has been much warmer and can be again without being destroyed.”

[Red Badger]

Damn the dinosaurs and their SUVs!........................

[Roman_War_Criminal]

This isn’t necessarily ground-breaking to us, but the timing of the report is.

[GOPJ]

"Summer temperatures averaged 19 (66.2F) degrees Celsius and water temperatures in rivers and swamps reached up to 20 (68 F) degrees.

Too many SUV's using fossil fuels...warms it all up.

[Rodm]

Noah’s Pre flood environment. Atheists add millions and billions of years as they have to macro-evolution to eliminate God the creator.

[teppe]

First we need to see if there’s evidence of the Athenasian Creed in the Bible!

Good luck with that ....

[aMorePerfectUnion]

Why would we need to see that??

No creed is inspired.

[SunkenCiv]

Don’t get me started on those bastards! ;^)

[crusty old prospector]

I am not an atheist nor do I believe the world is 7,000 years old.

2 Peter 3:8

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

[Vermont Lt]

Plate tectonics has been a thing for a long time. Evidently there are some that are surprised stuff moves around.

[teppe]

Your answer: “no creed is inspired”

I absolutely agree. And yet, the Athenasian Creed is the basis for the Doctrine of the Trinity.

(If you don’t agree show me where the name ‘Trinity’ originates as a doctrine)