We know Antarctica as an unfathomably cold wasteland, suitable for little beyond penguins and foolhardy researchers. But it hasn’t always been like that. At times in the distant past, plate tectonics and warmer climates have combined to cover Antarctica with lush forests, dinosaurs, and even marsupials. A paper published in PNAS details the final transition from habitable continent to the inhospitable ice cap that has developed over the past 40 million years. Its results describe the ecosystems that survived in the last unglaciated corner of Antarctica before the ice sheet swept away the last remnants of terrestrial life.
To accomplish this, the team behind the paper set out to read the history recorded in the sediment around the Antarctic Peninsula (Antarctica’s "tail"), which would have been the last piece of the continent to be covered by an ice sheet. They used seismic imaging of the sedimentary layers offshore to identify locations with sediment from the desired age range.
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