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Evidence of Ancient Rainforests Found In Antarctica (cnn.com) 113

mi writes: Researchers have discovered evidence that Antarctica supported a swampy rainforest as "recently" as 90 million years ago, according to a new study. "Even during months of darkness, swampy temperate rainforests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than we expected," said Tina van de Flierdt, study co-author and professor in the Imperial College London's Department of Earth Science and Engineering. The researchers took CT scans of a slice of the seafloor near the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. They revealed pristine samples of forest soil, pollen, spores and even root systems so well preserved that they could identify cell structures.

The researchers say that the warming effect caused by higher carbon dioxide levels created the right conditions for a rainforest environment. "The average daytime temperature was 53 degrees Fahrenheit," reports CNN. "River and swamp temperatures were likely around 68 degrees Fahrenheit. And the Antarctic summer temperature was likely around 66 degrees Fahrenheit. They estimate rainfall reached about 97 inches per year -- about the same as Wales today."
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Evidence of Ancient Rainforests Found In Antarctica

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  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @02:23AM (#59899784)

    Wasn't somewhere else than the south pole, 90 million years ago?
    You know... continental drift...

    • As long as the tests are reproducible, I'm good with it.

    • by Javaman59 ( 524434 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @02:33AM (#59899804)

      There's a map in the article. Antarctica was pretty much where it is now. The rainforests described in this article were, as the lead para says "close to the South Pole".

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Wasn't somewhere else than the south pole, 90 million years ago? You know... continental drift...

      That won't keep the right wing from citing this as proof of the fact that climate change is nonsense.

    • Drake Passage (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @02:57AM (#59899856) Journal
      That might be part of the issue but I expect another large part was the opening of the Drake Passage around 49-17 million years ago. Once that opened it established a circumpolar ocean current around Antarctica that isolated the continent from warmer currents from the tropics (like the gulf stream than warms Europe) and caused temperatures to drop there.
    • No.
      Other than Australia hanging off of it like a wart, the continent was in pretty much the same place.
      There are cool globes available online to show how the continents were arranged at specific points in time.
    • Wasn't somewhere else than the south pole, 90 million years ago? You know... continental drift...

      ~BAReFO0t

      It is exactly this kind of vague and and inherently genius-level intuiting for which readers of science periodicals can both benefit and be thankful to thwart the pipe-smoking snobs, fearful in their Ivory Towers, who are eager to suppress it.

      ~ Kenning the BigFoot, Sections You Know 174-99, 2020

      • Yeah, I saw the typo. It was too late. Not that I'm one of those retards who hate people that help them improve by pointing out there mistakes. So thanks anyway.

        But xall me when you did something to give Slashdot mobile a preview function,
        or when you bought a smartphone with an actual keyboard, so they become mainstream enough, so I can afford one. :)

    • Antarctica wasn't far from the south pole even then. The reason for rainforests is that ocean currents were able to go around the globe. In such a configuration, heat can circulate well and the whole of Earth has warm temperatures. In such a situation, there are no glaciers on Earth (no ice age. We are currently in an ice age, in an interglacial period.). Later the equatorial current was broken up, and Antarctica separated from Australia creating the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and Antarctica began to co
    • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      90 million years is not very long for continents to move around much. Especially not Antarctica. Being on the pole it doesn't move much at all. But you can google the positions [usgs.gov] if you want...
      • Panama apparently closed off the circum-global current only 5 million years ago. Then there's Charles Hapgood...

      • True, it didn't move much, but afaik that has nothing to do with its being near the pole. Wegener might have been right about the fact of continental drift, but he was wrong about the mechanism: it's not the Coriolis effect.

        • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

          but afaik that has nothing to do with its being near the pole.

          It has everything to do with it. Centripetal force from the spinning Earth wants to make the continents near the equator (where the force is greatest) space themselves out. That's why the Earth is not a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid - because it spins. A continent at a pole experiences less force. Of course centripetal force is not the ONLY force experienced by continents, but over a period of millions and billions of years it's not insignificant.

    • RTFA?
  • by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @02:35AM (#59899808)

    In Larry Niven's book "A World out of Time"

    Now we just need a nuclear fusion motor to play planetary billiards, shift earth's orbit a teensy bit closer to the sun.......

  • Wales (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Happy Welsh Wizard ( 826432 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @02:46AM (#59899832)
    I think this is more a story about how bloody wet and cold Wales is now than how warm the Antarctic was in the past.
  • If that helps, 53 degrees F is about 11 degrees C, and matches what I found as the mean temperature for London here [timeanddate.com]

    • Amazing that the editors do write a nice "Fahrenheit" after each temperature (an F would be enough), yet they don't provide the C temperature that many expect on Slashdot.
      • yet they don't provide the C temperature that many expect on Slashdot.

        Imperial indeed sucks; that having been said, welcome* to this American website which you ever-complaining Euro-fucks>nevertheless insist on visiting.

        *Said loosely, as the vast majority of you are complacent, historically-ignorant eunuchs.

        • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

          In america/australia, 100 years is a long time.

          In europe, 100 kilometres is a long distance.

          And in both regions, 100 degrees is hot.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by blindseer ( 891256 )

          The imperial system of measurements can't be all that bad. There's two nations in the world that use the imperial system, USA and Liberia. One of those nations put humans on the moon and brought them back safely.

          • The imperial system of measurements can't be all that bad. There's two nations in the world that use the imperial system, USA and Liberia.

            Several nations are mixed Imperial and metric, including the US.

            Officially Myanmar is the only country that uses imperial. Though I believe gasoline switched to metric last year. The US and Liberia us US Customary Units, which have some slight differences. But metric is used for a lot of things in the US. Soda is bought in liters, medications are measured in milligrams, engine displacement for newer cars is measured in liters, watts for electricity, etc.

            In Canada a persons height is still measured in inche

            • by jbengt ( 874751 )

              The US and Liberia us US Customary Units, which have some slight differences. But metric is used for a lot of things in the US.

              Indeed. For example, the US uses SI (metric) units to define the US Customary Units. (Wasn't always that way, which is why you have the standard, or international, foot, defined as 0.3048 meters, and you have the US survey foot which is currently defined as 1200/3937 meters, which is closer to the old measurement based on standard physical metal yards kept in England.)

            • Pints? It comes in pints?!!!

          • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            Actually, Liberia officially uses the metric system. The US does too, but they multiply the values by some constants to make them close to imperial units.

        • Said loosely, as the vast majority of you are complacent, historically-ignorant eunuchs

          At least we have... a history.

  • From this discussion, Hume goes onto present his formulation of the problem of induction in A Treatise of Human Nature, writing "there can be no demonstrative arguments to prove, that those instances, of which we have had no experience, resemble those, of which we have had experience."

    I'll just leave this here. [wikipedia.org]

    • Hey, now, ya can't knock INDUCTION. Discovery is a process of wavering the semantic power of words and their structure:
      (1)Nominalization [-tion];
      (2)Roots and cognates [DUCT]; and
      (3)Affixes [DE and IN].

      Not a time critical circumstance wherein policy actually impacts lives. When I'm just too busy to deduce this or that about geological intervals, I think of Morgan Freeman's voice telling me all about Andy Dufresne:

      Geology is the study of pressure and time. That’s all it takes, really. Pressure a
    • This is a nice quote: "The problem calls into question all empirical claims made in everyday life or through the scientific method, and, for that reason, the philosopher C. D. Broad said that "induction is the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy."

      • Not actually an argument there, more like a simple characterization.

        But yes, this issue is what sent Popper off to attempt to fix the issue, for which he switched to the notion of falsification as the criteria. Leading us to the alternate state that science is unprovable, but we can say generally theories haven't been falsified... yet. Which is as far as we actually can ever say.

        I'm actually not against this or other conclusions of science, properly understood as to their constraints. As the article show

        • I don't have an issue with going with the most -probable- model in a given case. I just get annoyed when unreproducible inferences from billions of years ago are presented as certain known fact. They aren't, and they can't be. And dogmatic science is no science at all.

          Agreed. But there are large segments of populations that will ignore information if is not "certain known", and come from sources that they "know certainly".

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @03:23AM (#59899894)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Your reference, Sir, may I say it is appreciated. Your disappointment is not in vain, you inglorious basterd.
    • Don't worry, my first response at the headline was a shiver of brooding madness at the thought of the unseen, soul-clutching horrors they might find should they dare to delve beneath the monolithic cliffs into unseen depths of forgotten ages... Oh no--by Tsathoggua--the shoggoths!
    • by CQDX ( 2720013 )

      That is because those who really know the truth are curled up in a corner rocking and crying. We are nothing.

  • If there is ancient forests there should be coal. And God made coal for us to burn.
  • ... they should ask themselves that if it was temperate at the south pole, just how hot was it where the USA and Europe are now and how many crops do they think could have grown there and hence how many humans could those regions have supported?

    If the climate goes back to what it was then good luck fitting 7 billion people on antartica and whatever slivers of inhabitable land would exist in the northern hemisphere. You can forget about australia - thats already mostly desert and getting more so every decade.

    • 90 million years ago was in the middle of the Late Cretaceous period.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      This was when T-rex was roaming the land that would become North America. If the world's climate did revert to how it was in that period then the amount of land humans could occupy comfortably would not be limited to Antarctica and a few slivers of land elsewhere. Quite the opposite really. During this time the world was very full of life.

      Let's not forget the ability of humans to turn deserts into fertile land. Agriculture is a thing, and humans have been doing well at this for a very ling time. We've been able to harness the work of beasts of burden to replace human effort. As well as extract power from flowing water, wind, and sun, in order to get work done. With the power of coal and petroleum we've been able to do far more. Now we know how to get even more power from uranium and thorium.

      We would not be isolated to Antarctica in this case. We'd turn deserts into croplands.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        In the past century we seem to have been at least as successful in turning fertile lands into deserts.

      • The plants and animals then were adapted to the conditions then. Even a complete idiot would realise the problem with having those conditions now.

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        Of course breathing with that Cretaceous level of CO2 (mean 1600 ppm) would present a challenge to a species that evolved to breathe Pleistocene levels of CO2 (around 200 ppm).

        1000 ppm commonly produce drowsiness and discomfort in people, and research (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3548274/ ) has found measurable cognitive declines at that level -- although it should be noted that US Navy-funded research is an outlier in this respect, usually showing little or no impairment at levels civilian

        • by aevan ( 903814 )
          Did the tests *ALSO* increase the oxygen concentration levels (as per the 50% higher value in the cretaceous), or just displace it by adding more CO2 to an existing mix?

          As for the navy test, they probably just used Marines.
          • by hey! ( 33014 )

            No, but that's beside the point because 1000ppm of CO2 isn't enough to to cause asphyxiation -- that's just 0.1% of the gases you're breathing in, just a trace gas. The effects are *toxic* -- it decreases the pH of your blood. O2 wouldn't compensate for that.

            Oh, and high levels of O2 are toxic as well.

            People evolved to live within a narrow range of conditions. When they beam down to a planet on Star Trek and don't need respirators, that's as much BS as California live oak apparently being the most widely

      • 90 million years ago was in the middle of the Late Cretaceous period. This was when T-rex was roaming the land that would become North America. We've been able to harness the work of beasts of burden to replace human effort.

        And the next time Antarctica is warm enough to sustain rainforests, we will definitely be harnessing those T-rexes to plow fields in North America.

        'Murika! Fuck yea!

      • "We would not be isolated to Antarctica in this case. We'd turn deserts into croplands."

        I've wondered this before and not seen a good answer. Besides 500+ feet of sea level rise flooding coastal zones, would a return to the Cretaceous period through increases in C02 in our atmosphere be actually good for the human animal?

        It seems like it was a period of global fertility and growth. Would desertification be more widespread especially on the equator, or would warmer temps evaporate ocean waters and create e

  • from the article

    And the sea level was 558 feet higher than it is now.

    or about 167m. That's enough to put a hundreds of millions of people's homes under water.

    • That's why I live in a penthouse.
    • That's enough to put a hundreds of millions of people's homes under water.

      That's surprisingly a lot less than I expected.

      • I also assume it could be a lot worse, numbers are pulled from somewhere dark.

      • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
        Good thing it's not going to happen overnight but will take centuries. How many centuries do you expect your cardboard home to last?
        • Well, it's a little over a century old already and seems to be holding up fine.
          That aside, I assumed he was speaking of the overall long-term displacement caused by such melt, not trying to fear monger with the claim that it was going to inundate the coasts of the world like a tsunami.
          No matter how you swing it though, sea level rise sucks.
          It may be a slow process, but the tertiary effects of it are quite drastic (storm surges reaching new distances inland, etc) which result in real deaths in places ther
  • That's some beautiful real-estate, folks. And believe me, I know real-estate.
  • Humans have been around for the last 200,000 years of the Earth's 4.5 billion years of existence.

    These findings suggest Anarctica was vastly different 90 million years ago, long before any human started driving a pick up truck to McDonald's, eating burgers with beef made from methane-spewing cows, and throwing their food packaging away.

    That would mean the climate changes no matter what people do... or don't do. The Earth will do her thing, regardless of how that affects us.
    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @05:01AM (#59900014)

      And every building and humans structure will inevitably collapse. That doesnt mean we need to help speed it up by taking wrecking balls to everything.

    • That would mean the climate changes no matter what people do...

      All that some of us question is the conceited 'anthrogenic' part of climate change.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by R005ter ( 443894 )

        CO2 causes heat to be trapped in the atmosphere.
        Humans have released a lot of CO2 in the last 2 hundred years.

        The 'anthrogenic' part of climate change is the rapidity of the change.

        The climate has changed in the past, but never as quickly as it is changing now. The rapidity of the change means it is much more difficult to adapt. This is why it is an issue.

        Specific animals and plants will not be fine as their local environments change more quickly than they can adapt or migrate.
        This includes humans.

        Overall

        • The climate has changed in the past, but never as quickly as it is changing now.

          Other than the Medieval Warm Period. Or the Roman Warm Period. Or the Minoan Warm Period. Or the Little Ice Age. But other than those times...

    • but, but....It must have been caused by Americuns, after all, Orange Man Bad
  • I find the "war against climate change" to be idiotic and futile. Firstly because the climate will change no matter what we do. Secondly because it is an imprecise and potentially misleading term to describe the problem of burning fossil fuels.

    The problem isn't even global warming, because warming by itself is not a problem. This discovery proves global warming to not be a hazard to life on the planet. Man made global warming isn't even the problem, if live can thrive in such conditions then does it mat

    • I find the "war against climate change" to be idiotic and futile.

      ~blindseer

      By George! What scattered you to the winds of solar and wind power for two solid state weeks...I mean, I knew you'd be back, but the interval was *pun intended* glacial?

    • by Anonymous Coward
      I've taken the problem seriously as have many other researchers, many of us have concluded that solar is an adequate pathway, if not the cheapest and most promising pathway to synthetic fuels. The fundamentals were laid out in the 1970s by some very good scientists. People who tout nuclear energy are the ones who aren't taking the problem seriously; they simply cannot accept that there are significant barriers to the rapid and cost effective deployment of nuclear energy.
      • People who tout nuclear energy are the ones who aren't taking the problem seriously; they simply cannot accept that there are significant barriers to the rapid and cost effective deployment of nuclear energy.

        Such as? What barriers would those be?

        Up until three years ago there was one large barrier to new nuclear power in the USA, the federal government. As of now there is one large threat to keeping current nuclear power plants open, Democrats in the US Congress. Here's a video of nuclear engineers and leaders of companies debating what holds them up from deploying nuclear power plants.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        They agree that the problem is the licensing. From this comes a problem of finding funding

    • by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @05:38AM (#59900070)
      I'm building a house Central Europe right now and it will have a wind generator and solar panels. If self generated small scale electricity is already cheaper than the grid power, then I would imagine that large scale wind devices would be very much cheaper than coal/nuclear/hydro.
      • If self generated small scale electricity is already cheaper than the grid power

        That's a might big "if". Because you're betting on non-dispatchable power sources. If the wind doesn't blow, and it's cloudy - no power generation for you. So how many batteries do you have in your basement? Page 7 [eia.gov] kind of lays it out - there are lots of better solutions out there...

    • The problem is catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. That is warming that comes too quickly and/or to such large levels that life on the planet cannot adjust.

      Let's assume that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a problem, even given this discovery that life can thrive on Antarctica if the world were to warm. What should we do about it?

      Let's summarize your argument then:

      1) the problem is X
      2) we assume that the problem is X
      3) therefore, what are we going to do about it?

      See any problem with that

    • I find the "war against climate change" to be idiotic and futile. Firstly because the climate will change no matter what we do. Secondly because it is an imprecise and potentially misleading term to describe the problem of burning fossil fuels.

      That's the point - declare an unwinnable war, personalize it, and then you can lead the populace around as you like. All in the name of "winning" the war. You'll live your life as others decree because you want to win the war, don't you? It's not about "climate change", it's about forcing others to live a lifestyle the few have selected as "ideal". And those few who select will live fabulously rich lives - like Stalin, Mao, Kim, and Castro.

      If you cannot unilaterally take over my force (as the previous f

  • Al Gore must be wondering how he missed an opportunity to get rich off of the event.

  • The tropic must have been *crispy*. That would be bad for us human.
    • The tropic must have been *crispy*. That would be bad for us human.

      No. It wasn't. Alarmists definitely want you to conclude that, but that's not how a planet covered in liquid water works. The equatorial latitudes 90 million years ago were much as they are now, only more so: ocean. 79% of the equator today is ocean. When sea levels were 250 meters higher than they are now, that percentage was even higher.

      More to the point, the tropics covered twice as much in terms of latitude as they do now, with tropical rainforest much farther north and south than it can survive to

  • by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @07:03AM (#59900190)
    News: "Evidence of ancient rainforests found in the South American desert".
  • by oogoliegoogolie ( 635356 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @08:38AM (#59900412)

    Sheesh and OMG, it has been known 30+ years ago that Antarctica once had a sub-tropical climate dozens of MYA, even-though the continent's position hasn't changed much compared to today. Same with the Arctic. Up in desolate frigid Ellesmere Island petrified forests, ferns and crocodile-like fossils can be found, and have been found for quite some time, even though it's latitude has also remained constant.

    What will be the next big & never-before-told scientific discovery story from decades ago be in 2020?
    -Plate tectonics?
    -Magnetic poles periodically flip?
    -Relativity?
    -The speed of light has successfully been measured?
    -DNA's double-helix structure has finally been unveiled?
    -Evidence suggests extensive past glaciation in North America?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    According to the book of Genesis, there used to be a canopy of water surrounding the earth. It has been assumed that makes a more equalized temperate environment.

  • Charles H Hapgood wrote a book; Earth's Shifting Crust, it has a Foreword by Albert Einstein and was published 1958. He is not the only individual to have come to the same conclusions regarding ice ages being caused by the crust shifting rather than changes in temperature, (as have others over the years). The basic conclusion is that ice deposited above sea level causes imbalances in the dynamics of the rotation of the planet, that, in turn, cause occasional movement of the planet crust. For example, during

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