Posted on 04/01/2020 9:48:52 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at upi.com ...
Climate change danger is nothing compared to the havoc of Continental Drift.
Left over from a hurricane? Asking for a friend.
A lot can happen in 90 million years.
CLIMATE CHANGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thus the need for bumper guards/fenders.
“The polar forest was made possible by climate change.”
Too many cars, even way back then./sarc
Thanks Oldeconomybuyer.
It doesn’t look a day over 1 million years old.
Except there have never been any fossilized materials recovered from any hole below 10,000 feet down. Oil wells average 30,000. Old wells have replenished to a great extent, without fracking.
Fossil fuel is BS. Abiotic is actual science. How many trees died on extraterrestrial moons/planets to create methane and hydrocarbon atmospheres?? None.
Oil, and long chain hydrocarbons exist due to our planets chemical composition and our molten core, Prospector. Heat, pressure, and hydrocarbons create oil, just as our refineries use similar processes to refine (or crack) that oil.
What is the second most common liquid on Earth, behind water? Oil. Fossil Fuel was coined by Rockerfeller in 1894 at the world chemical conference on organic chemistry. He wanted to ensure that the new product of Standard Oil could gain in value, claiming shortage of supply at strategic times. Sound familiar?
I was thinking the same thing...howd it get so cold?
A very misleading statement, but what you might expect from journalists as evidenced by their understanding of virus pandemics. Both Antarctica and Australia had a portion of their continents within the Antarctic Circle, but the South Pole was free of any land mass. This meant that ocean currents were very different and there was no southern ice cap. Perhaps sea ice in the southern winter that likely melted in the summer. The Earth was much warmer during this period and the evidence for forests in Antarctica has been well known for some time. Both Antartica and Australia had forests, dinosaurs, and many other flora and fauna just like land masses in the Northern Hemisphere. Things that aren't studied in Journalism School.
Naah, the earth just tilted over on its axis(not the deer)The old South Pole is under the deep blue sea. The old North Pole was Toledo, explaining the peculiar citizens.
The HAB Theory
“every 6,0007,000 years the Earth’s polar ice caps become over-burdened with ice, creating such an imbalance in the planet’s center of gravity, that the Earth’s poles and the Earth’s equator shift positions. The former poles are soon located somewhere between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, where the weight of the polar ice cap leaves a large circular depression and other dramatic geological changes occur as the huge quantity of water is released by the ice caps melting.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_HAB_Theory
In the beginning there were waters above and waters below.
Sodium laced water at orbital temperature is a super conductor and would levitate on the planetary magnetic field.
Until a magnetic polar reversal event.
A water shield would make a near perfect radiation shield.
Radio carbon dating assumes there was no such shield in place. Which is why RCD is wildly and randomly inaccurate when dating things over 6000 years ago.
And why things found in SEDIMENTARY deposits always date millions of years old.
In order for there to have been forests world wide, all tropical the earth would have had to have been encased in a giant greenhouse. If the sky was clear as it is currently, thermal radiation leakage insures wildly divergent temperature extremes creating icy polar regions.
Simple third grade science...
A PBS NOVA earth science special a few weeks ago was excellent until the end. They first said that the existence of temperate conditions at the south pole in the past was not all due to shift of the continental plates, but to very high CO2 levels at that time (volcanoes mainly). As an earth scientist myself I could agree with that analysis of past geological events.
But they went off the rails when they said that unless we attack global warming and climate change to reduce CO2 we will cause a repeat of this geological event, though with a result not as drastic.
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