LiveScience has a story about a fossil rainforest under the ice in Antarctica. This forest was found in West Antarctica and dates to about 90 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period. The fossils show a tropical climate similar to New Zealand. Read all about it in a paper in the April 1st, 2020 edition of the journal Nature.
The rainforest's remains were discovered under the ice in a sediment core that a team of international researchers collected from a seabed near Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica in 2017.
As soon as the team saw the core, they knew they had something unusual. The layer that had formed about 90 million years ago was a different color. "It clearly differed from the layers above it," study lead researcher Johann Klages, a geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, said in a statement.
Back at the lab, the team put the core into a CT (computed tomography) scanner. The resulting digital image showed a dense network of roots throughout the entire soil layer. The dirt also revealed ancient pollen, spores and the remnants of flowering plants from the Cretaceous period.
By analyzing the pollen and spores, study co-researcher Ulrich Salzmann, a paleoecologist at Northumbria University in England, was able to reconstruct West Antarctica's 90 million-year-old vegetation and climate. "The numerous plant remains indicate that the coast of West Antarctica was, back then, a dense temperate, swampy forest, similar to the forests found in New Zealand today," Salzmann said in the statement.
