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| Antarctica was warm enough for rainforest near south pole 90m years ago pic The Guardian |
It's hard to believe, but once Antarctica was covered with giant forests.
To date, one of Francis' most amazing fossil finds has been found in the Transantarctic Mountains, not far from where Scott made his discoveries.
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| Location map showing the part of the Transantarctic Mountains and Ross ResearchGate |
"We were up on the icy peaks when we found a layer of sedimentary rocks, filled with fragile leaves and branches," - she recalls.
These fossils turned out to be remnants of beech bushes. Their age is only three to five million years, and they were the last.
The secrets of the petrified forests of Antarctic plants, which lived on the continent before a deep cold. However, other findings indicate that subtropical forests did exist in Antarctica much earlier in the dinosaur era.
In the middle of Antarctica, even at high altitude, the fossils of extensive forests of tropical conifers and deciduous trees, especially beech, but also other tropical plants were discovered. Interestingly, the development rings of fossilized Antarctic trees have their own characteristic, namely that they do not have slow-growing rings during the winter. Scientists believe that tropical warming in Antarctica has to do with excess atmospheric CO2, but I see things differently:
The amount of carbon dioxide needed to heat Antarctica to such values would have turned the rest of the planet into an irreversible Venusian furnace.
Antarctica has always been found at the south pole because the Antarctic ridge is very close to the edge of the current sea ice, ie somewhere in the southern part of Patagonia, so the opposite edge of Antarctica would have been on the south pole, ie the south pole walked on the edges Antarctica and therefore the ice cap would have been permanent across the continent in any drift situation on the continents.
The only situation that can explain an Antarctic covered by tropical forests is a planetary inclination on the axis close to zero compared to 21-25 degrees normally.
If the inclination on the axis were zero or only a few degrees, then each latitude would have corresponded to a constant climatic regime corresponding to a month of the year:
- the intertropical zone would turn into a hot desert at +60 C / + 70 C;
- the Mediterranean area would be quite arid and hot but habitable in higher areas;
- the temperate zone starting from Bulgaria and close to the poles would correspond to June, then May (for Romania), April (Poland), March (Scandinavia), and in the polar areas it would be slightly warmer than in Scandinavia, because the sun would be in the sky all year round, although like in our morning, and the temperatures would always be positive around +15 C / + 20 C.
So there would be no glaciers except on the northern slopes at altitude, and in Antarctica there would be no tropical climate, but a humid oceanic, without frost, without winter, without snow and without night.
