Scientists unearth fossils that reveal how Antarctica was once covered in forests

Antarctica, the White Continent, may be covered with ice, but once it was home to lush forests, a new study has revealed.

New-found intricate fossils have revealed how trees flourished in the region when it was part of the huge Southern Hemisphere landmass known as Gondwana.

The prehistoric forest stretched across the entirety of this area during the Permian Period, which lasted between 299 to 251 million years ago.

The forest would have been made of a mixture of mosses, ferns and extinct woody plants called Glossopteris, according to scientists.

Today, Antarctica is the windiest, driest, coldest and most inhabitable continent on the planet.

“Antarctica preserves an ecologic history of polar biomes that ranges for about 400 million years, which is basically the entirety of plant evolution,” said Erik Gulbranson, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

“The continent as a whole was much warmer and more humid than it currently is today. Oddly enough, these field sites would have actually been very close to what their current latitude is.”

Gulbranson and John Isbell were part of an international team of researchers who searched for fossil fragments in Antarctica between November 2016 and January 2017.

The group climbed the McIntyre Promontory’s frozen slopes in the Transantarctic Mountains.

By the end of the expedition, they had uncovered 13 fossil fragments from trees dating back more than 260 million years, according to National Geographic.

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The fossils are from around the time of the world’s greatest mass extinction event, with Gulbranson calling them a “glimpse into life” before then.

During this period, more than 90 per cent of species on Earth disappeared, including polar forests. Gulbranson says it was most likely caused by volcanism in present-day Siberia

“They’re actually some of the best-preserved fossil plants in the world,” Gulbranson said. “The fungi in the wood itself were probably mineralised and turned into stone within a matter of weeks, in some cases probably while the tree was still alive.

“These things happened incredibly rapidly. You could have witnessed it firsthand if you were there.”

“Somehow these plants were able to survive not only four to five months of complete darkness, but also four to five months of continuous light,” Gulbranson says.

“We don’t fully understand how they were able to cope with these conditions, just that they did.”