It’s Official: Antarctica Used to Have a Rainforest
New evidence shows that the planet’s coldest continent harbored rich, wet forests in the dinosaurs’ time. The results will help shape estimates of human-driven warming.
If there’s one thing anybody knows about Antarctica, it’s that it’s cold. Yes, people are heating the whole planet. And yes, the world’s biggest glaciers are rapidly turning into ocean. Still, there’s so much ice sitting atop the southernmost continent that we’ll need centuries to melt all of it.
So maybe there was some subtle cold bias that drove routine professional skepticism in the mid-1990s about scientific results suggesting that the South Pole and its environs had surprisingly warm oceans in the dinosaurs’ heyday. Some scientists cast shade again a few years later when research showed that global CO₂ levels 90 millions years ago could have been several times higher than they are today—with consequently higher temperatures, as well.