from the couldn't-see-the-wood-for-the-trees^W-ice dept.
https://www.livescience.com/ancient-rainforest-antarctica.html
About 90 million years ago, West Antarctica was home to a thriving temperate rainforest, according to fossil roots, pollen and spores recently discovered there, a new study finds.
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. 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.
The sediment core revealed that during the mid-Cretaceous, West Antarctica had a mild climate, with an annual mean air temperature of about 54 F (12 C), similar to that of Seattle. Summer temperatures were warmer, with an average of 66 F (19 C). In rivers and swamps, the water would have reached up to 68 F (20 C).
"Before our study, the general assumption was that the global carbon dioxide concentration in the Cretaceous was roughly 1,000 ppm [parts per million]," study co-researcher Gerrit Lohmann, a climate modeler at Alfred Wegener Institute, said in the statement. "But in our model-based experiments, it took concentration levels of 1,120 to 1,680 ppm to reach the average temperatures back then in the Antarctic."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2148-5
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @04:02PM (7 children)
At the current rate of warming, it might be not that much longer in the future that we'll have another rainforest in Antarctica!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @04:28PM
And at least parts of the ancient rain forest will have been converted to petroleum of one flavor or another. Cue the oil exploration drillers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday April 03 2020, @07:01PM (4 children)
The real question is, if we've got rainforests in Antarctica, what do the tropics, and the rest of the world, look like? Continent-spanning deserts weren't exactly rare during Hothouse Earth periods, and there's not a whole lot of farmland near the poles.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @07:38PM
Deserts are not caused by heat, but by a lack of precipitation. So, for instance, Antarctica is a desert. This [deeptimemaps.com] site has a nice series of time-relative biome maps. Suffice to say, deserts were quite rare. For instance this is why you'll often find a desert on one side or another of a mountain. It ends up creating a sort of trap that prevents moisture from getting onto one side or the other so you end up with weird things like a dessert and lush tropics basically side by side.
High temperatures, high humidity, and high CO2 levels are basically a dream scenario for most plant life. Most of the world looked similar, but greener, hotter, and wetter. Keep in mind this period is when beasts like the Argentinosaurus [wikipedia.org] roamed the Earth. At 100 ton, 130 feet - think about the greenery consumed by a single one of these creatures. 'Clear cutting' a forest? Yeah, that's an afternoon snack. And the dinos thrived for tens of millions of years.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @07:45PM (2 children)
As a followup on the above, since 1901 global precipitation has been increasing [epa.gov] at a rate of 0.08 inches per decade. In the US it's been increasing at 0.17 inches per decade. Global warming has and will continue to be much more likely to create rainforests than deserts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @07:46PM (1 child)
Unless we cover the nice bits with concrete...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2020, @07:59AM
Check out the images of Chernobyl. [duckduckgo.com]
Perhaps like this virus is emphasizing. Nature wins. Always. The only question is when.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday April 04 2020, @12:30AM
Yet, the Earth will be just fine.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @04:09PM
More rainforest is better than more ice!
If you disagree, move to Antarctica. The rainforest is unlikely to sprout there in your lifetime.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @04:15PM
We've read our Lovecraft, we know where it's going to end with all these core samples...(and no playing with those spores, yes, yes, it might be interesting to see if any of them are viable...but we don't want to be going and raising up any ickle wickle baby Elder things there folks, do we?...)
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Friday April 03 2020, @04:27PM (5 children)
Given our current understandings of Plate Tectonics, where was Antarctica located 90 mya? If it was more-or-less at the south pole where it is today, this is a remarkable finding - especially considering winter months without sunshine.
(Score: 3, Informative) by KilroySmith on Friday April 03 2020, @04:31PM
OK, I did skim TF abstract before posting, but going back I see that they suggest the area was at 82 degrees S latitude, which is approximately where it is today.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday April 04 2020, @12:35AM (3 children)
I found a site [dinosaurpictures.org] where you can dial the Earth to different epochs in the past to see what it looked like. Eyeballing it, it looks like parts of Antarctica then were at the same latitude as Tierra del Fuego. There are trees in Tierra del Fuego, so Antarctica didn't have to be very much higher than it is today to support trees as long as the prevailing jet stream and ocean currents kept it warm enough. If the site I found is correct, the sea level was higher then, too, which may have helped the hothouse effect.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Saturday April 04 2020, @03:14PM (2 children)
One of the reasons that Antarctica is so cold now is that it is cut off from the rest of the world by the Southern ocean being open right around the world. When Tierra del Fuego was connected to Antarctica, the ocean currents would have been quite different, possibly bringing warm water to parts of Antarctica much like the Gulf stream with N. Europe.
Over geologic time scales, Continental drift is a big driver of climate change. Ocean currents changing, mountain ranges popping up and blocking wind and such.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday April 04 2020, @04:19PM (1 child)
Yes, that sounds right. Antarctica also has katabatic winds blowing from the center of the continent to the periphery.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday April 04 2020, @05:01PM
I'd assume that katabatic winds would happen anywhere with a huge plateau.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EEMac on Friday April 03 2020, @05:26PM
Can we burn it to fuel our cars?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 03 2020, @06:02PM (2 children)
> But in our model-based experiments
AKA model
My issue with correlating temperature with CO2 is that it assumes you know the energy irradiated by the sun in the past. Has it been desumed, how?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @06:51PM
You might find this PDF [arxiv.org] interesting.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday April 04 2020, @03:20PM
They have a pretty good idea of how the Sun's output has increased over the years, as it converts hydrogen to helium, it gets denser and produces more heat. You could search for the faint Sun paradox. Of course 90 million years isn't that long compared to the age of the Solar System.
A better question is how dense the atmosphere was at the time? Was the sea level pressure 1 ATM, more, less? Never seen much on that, just ratios of oxygen and CO2 and sometimes methane.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @07:19PM (5 children)
If only we had acted sooner, we might have saved it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @08:53PM
Yes i blameyou for not acting.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday April 03 2020, @11:07PM (3 children)
Isn't this what we are doing now? Defrosting the rain forest ...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EEMac on Saturday April 04 2020, @01:28PM (2 children)
Sorry, we've got new terms again.
global coolingglobal warmingclimate changeSomething is happening! Be afraid!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @07:55PM (1 child)
If the country next door sinks then guess who's coming to stay with you for an epoch or 2?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday April 04 2020, @10:41PM
Just wait for the wall vs Mexico to be done, it's just the prototype for the wall of the north to keep all the hostile eskimoes and Canuck out. The God emperor has thought of everything.