These sidereal day , Antarctica is the cold , driest space on Earth . What piddling life it harbors clings to the edge of the continent . But that was n’t always true . 45 million long time ago , Antarctica was a luxuriant rainwater woods , teem with life .
Although we tend to affiliate the terminal figure with red-hot , sandy spot like the Sahara , the man ’s biggest desert is really Antarctica . The coastline only receives about 8 inches of precipitation each class , and it ’s even less than that further inland . The McMurdo Dry Valleys , in fact , have not received any hurriedness in millions of years , thanks to unbelievably strongkatabatic windsthat evaporate any incoming water or snow .
It ’s hard to imagine liveliness ever thriving on this abrasive , unforgiving continent , but the new discovery of ancient polo-neck finger cymbals dated to about 45 million years ago serve up as a reminder that Antarctica was once a very different place . Found on nearby Seymour Island , the bone are a distich fragments from either one or two polo-neck ’ shells , and they belong to a species that was antecedently unknown in this neighborhood .
That suggests greater polo-neck multifariousness than was previously bed , which in turn indicates Antarctica was even warmer than antecedently thought . That ’s because variety is , generally speaking , directly relate to the temperature of the water , with lots of multifariousness in tropic piddle and relatively low diversity in more frigid waters .
In the Eocene Epoch , which lasted from about 56 to 34 million years ago , Antarctica was still plug in to New Guinea and Australia , forge the last vestiges of the southern supercontinent Gondwanaland . The fact that Antarctica was connected by terra firma to these other large regions aid isolate it from colder ocean currents , which leave the continent to support a tropical rainforest . At that metre , Antarctica was home to lots of tropical and subtropical animals , including turtles and even pouched mammal , which have also been discovered on Seymour Island .
About 23 million age ago , Antarctica became completely isolated from other landmass , which hastened the spread head of internal-combustion engine across the continent and ultimately killed off all but the hardiest lifeforms , such as penguins and germ , which still manage to eke out a cold world on the antarctic shoreline . Even then , it took a while for the last of the old way of life to be completely extinguished . As recently at 3 million class ago , a vast temperate forest thrived just 400 miles from the South Pole .
Antarctica is now cover in a monumental , permanent stratum of shabu , and it ’s unlikely that Antarctica will ever again expand like it once did , at least not without millions more age of dull geologic change . So for now it ’s left to small artefact like these shell fragment to serve as reminder of what Antarctica once was . And , if nothing else , it ’s all proof that , against all betting odds , theSavage Landisn’t entirely ridiculous .
[ viaLiveScience ]
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