Antarctic
rainforest found, according to BBC News and ScienceDaily 1 April 2020, and Nature
2 April 2020, doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2148-5.
A team of scientists from Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Germany and the
British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have examined a core of rock from West
Antarctica, approximately 900km from the South Pole and found it contained
fossilised tree roots, soil and pollen grains. The researchers concluded they
had drilled into a region that was once covered in temperate rainforest and
swamps, similar to those found in present day New Zealand.
Karsten Gohl of AWI described the findings as: “It’s like we’ve drilled into a
modern swamp environment and you’re seeing the living root system, small plant
particles and pollen – but this is all preserved from 90 million years ago”.
It is far too cold for anything to grow in Antarctica today, so the scientists
concluded that temperatures were much warmer in the past, with summer
temperatures reaching to around 20 degrees Celsius. Tina van de Flierdt, of
Imperial College London commented: “The preservation of this
90-million-year-old forest is exceptional, but even more surprising is the
world it reveals. 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”.
The research team suggest the world was warmer because carbon dioxide levels
were much higher. They estimated levels of 1,120–1,680 parts per million (ppm),
compared with today’s levels of around 400ppm.
The rock layer is classified as Cretaceous, a period in the evolutionary
timetable considered to be dominated by dinosaurs. Jane Francis, of BAS,
commented: “And, yes, there probably were dinosaurs in the forests. If you go
to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, you’ll find a whole range of fossils –
things like hadrosaurs and sauropods, and primitive bird-like dinosaurs. The
whole range of dinosaurs that lived in the rest of the world managed to get
down to Antarctica during the Cretaceous.
Links:
BBC, ScienceDaily
Editorial Comment: Around the same time as this study was published,
there were news reports about a “record breaking heatwave” in Antarctica with
temperatures of 9 degrees Celsius. If Antarctica experienced temperatures of 20
degrees Celsius then reaching 9 degrees in 2020 cannot be a record breaker.
Whenever claims of “record breaking” temperatures are claimed it is worth
asking, ‘Who has been keeping the records and for how long?’
These days all warming trends are blamed on global warming caused by emissions
from human industry. However, the discovery of rainforest remains in Antarctica
is a good reminder that the world has had very different climates in the past,
and it had nothing to do with human industry. The Bible, which is the real
record of world history, tells us that in the beginning God made everything
very good, and that animals and people were to live on plants. The fossil
record of lush vegetation and dinosaurs in places where nothing lives now,
confirms that the whole world was once a pleasant place to live, but it has
drastically changed for the worse following the world-wide catastrophe of
Noah’s flood. Now there are significant areas where plants don’t grow and
animals cannot live.
Creation Research News 14 May 2020