Discover the way into the "shadow forest" of dinosaurs under the ... Antarctic glacier

A core of sediment taken up near Pine Island and the Antarctic Thwaites glorified an incredible and incredible tropical rainforest belonging to the Cretaceous.
According to a recent publication in the journal Nature, this forest has been dense, green, warm despite its near-polar latitude, which does not allow day-night to experience normal life: every creature will have to live in semi-continuous daylight for a half year and a half year of darkness. The existence of dazzling tropical vegetation for months of continuous darkness seems to defy all biological laws.

This may be an image of the Cretaceous Antarctic continent - graphic image from J. McKay / Alfred-Wegener-Institut

The forest has a life of up to 90 million years, which is part of the Cretaceous period, the time of dinosaur explosion. But scientists have yet to determine if dinosaurs roam here. The forest stretches for 900 km from the South Pole of the Earth.

The traces of the forest were found by a team led by Dr. Tina van de Flierdt from Imperial College London's Department of Earth Science and Technology (University of London, UK) through a sedimentary core collected by how to drill the ocean floor in the area near Pine Island and Antarctic Thwaites glacier. In this core, they found plant roots, pollen and spores mixed in the soil, which the cold climate preserved almost intact.

The mysterious forest has just been found to confirm the evidence that during the period of 115-80 million years ago, the Middle Cretaceous period, the earth became the warmest of all time. New evidence suggests that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere at that time was much higher than previous theories. So much so that the glacial Antarctic we see today did not have snow and ice but green, dense vegetation that we can only find today in tropical rainforests or wetlands. temperate.