The ‘lost worlds’ are in stark contrast to modern Antarctica, teeming with exotic life, though all of it has turned into fossils.
According to a study recently published in the scientific journal Science Advances, geochronological and sedimentological analysis of drill cores taken from the Amundsen Sea shelf in West Antarctica has revealed two surprising “lost worlds.”
The first world, represented by deep sediments dating from the mid-Cretaceous period, about 85 million years ago.
It is a sedimentary layer filled with fossilized traces of countless strange animals and plants, which no longer exist on earth.
Evidence of a dinosaur-era ‘lost world’ emerges beneath icy Antarctica
In addition to the primary fossils, spores and pollen trapped in the ice also reveal a temperate rainforest that once dominated what is now a permanently icy landscape.
The discovery lends credence to a theory that at one point in time, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, there was a time when it was hotter – at least in the south – and what is now Antarctica was teeming with life.
A second, shallower layer of sediment preserves evidence of another green period during the Eocene (55.8-33.9 million years ago) of the Paleogene, the period immediately following the Cretaceous, when the dinosaurs became extinct.
What is preserved in the sediments shows that Eocene Antarctica was still a vast river delta, with a large load of organic matter, suggesting that many animals and plants lived there at that time.
That ancient river delta had as its “backbone” a giant river system that flowed from the rising Transantarctic Mountains into the Amundsen Sea.
According to Heritage Daily, scientists previously knew about another ice-free period of Antarctica, through the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition in 1910–1913.
The expedition discovered fossils from Glossopteris plants, a genus of seed ferns that became extinct during the end-Diepasiatic mass extinction, which occurred about 252 million years ago.