Scientists Just Made a Groundbreaking Discovery in Antarctica

antarctica a snowy world of about -46° F covered in ice for millions of years But it wasn't always this way Scientists just found something buried deep beneath the seafloor that shouldn't exist Tiny golden droplets of amber This means that Antarctica was once teeming with life and thick with trees But something happened to it Something that could reshape the way we see our own future Antarctica has been a land of howling winds for millions of years No tree can grow here today But scientists who studied those lands decided to drill deep beneath the Antarctic surface They went thousands of feet below the ice pulling up ancient layers of sediment And there trapped in time they found tiny pieces of golden amber Amber is basically fossilized tree resin It's found all over the world often with perfectly preserved pieces of ancient life Insects trapped mid-flight Pollen frozen in time Entire tiny ecosystems can be locked inside golden droplets In every continent but not in Antarctica until now They discovered tiny specks from 0.5 to 1 millimeter in size smaller than a grain of sand but with huge significance This droplet had once oozed from the bark of a tree about 90 million years ago What's even wilder amber is only produced by certain types of trees the ones that grow in humid temperate rainforests and jungles That's when the realization hit Antarctica used to be a rainforest Those tiny flexcks of amber clearly seen only under a microscope tell us a vivid story of a living and breathing ecosystem Around 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous period when dinosaurs ruled the Earth Antarctica could have been covered in lush swampy forests filled with towering conifers ferns and ancient plants Some of the fragments showed signs of damage That means the trees that produced them had been injured perhaps by wildfires or parasites Though despite that and despite the fact it spent millions of years on the seafloor this amber was almost perfectly preserved solid transparent and free of cracks Normally amber buried under extreme pressure and heat just crashes over time But this piece it survived That means other pieces could survive as well and we might find more of them on the ocean floor But this wasn't the first sign that Antarctica had once been a different place entirely It started in 2017 A team of scientists drilled deep into the seabed near Pine Island Glacier on Antarctica's west coast They pulled up sediment cores long cylindrical samples of earth that had been buried for millions of years And it was insane Inside these layers they found fossilized roots pollen spores traces of an ancient forest that had once thrived here And that's exactly what they'd been studying ever since then In order not to damage anything they had to spend years of hard work breaking down the sediment into thousands of tiny pieces and scanning them all under fluorescent microscopes The same team also found another piece of the puzzle back in 2020 They found more sedimentary samples from the ocean floor that pointed to a land of dense trees rivers and wetlands a world that looked more like the Pacific Northwest or New Zealand But why was Antarctica so warm back then Well that's all because of the atmosphere 90 million years ago Earth's carbon dioxide levels were terrifyingly high It was literally one of the warmest periods in history with temperatures soaring even at the poles Think about it Antarctica had no ice caps Instead it could have had buzzing insects and maybe even dinosaurs wandering through its forests But in order to learn what happened to them the team has to find more evidence Antarctica really is a place full of mysteries It's hard to study because it's covered in snow and ice so much that we don't even know its true shape and size Some parts of the ice sheet are over 3 m thick half the depth of the Mariana Trench the deepest trench on Earth Luckily snow has a great quality It can freeze things in time perfectly layer by layer year after year It buries nature's past like a time capsule Luckily snow has a great quality It can freeze things in time perfectly Layer by layer year after year it buries nature's past like a time capsule At first fresh snow is soft and shifts easily in the wind full of air But as more snow piles on top it compresses squeezing out the air pockets and hardening into dense ice This freezing pressure locks everything inside It traps ancient plants animals and even entire landscapes and they literally get frozen in time because the extreme cold slows down decay It stops bacteria growth preventing rot and keeping things almost perfectly intact for thousands sometimes even millions of years That's exactly what's going on in Antarctica Scientists have to literally scan it all the way down this snow in order to find what this place looked like millions of years ago What they found is an entire lost world buried under miles of ice It was beneath the thickest ice of East Antarctica near the Aurora and Schmidt subglacial basins The weight of the ice has been so immense for so long that it actually protected the land from erosion Scientists call it the ghost of Antarctica's landscape And it's nothing like the smooth flat wasteland seen from above They found rivers that once flowed freely now frozen in place Valleys carved by water Even three massive sharply peaked hills But what are they To understand that we need to go even further back in time to the era when Antarctica was still part of a lost superc continent Hundreds of millions of years ago the land we now call Antarctica was part of Gonduana an enormous superc continent that included South America Africa India Australia and Antarctica all fused together But as Earth's tectonic plates slowly drifted apart Gonduana broke into pieces Antarctica was ripped apart its land stretched and fractured The massive ice sheets that formed later covered these broken land masses preserving them like frozen fossils As the ice shifted and melted over time valleys formed and ancient rivers likely carried water toward a coast that was hundreds of miles away from where it is now But that's not the only thing Antarctica has hidden If you stripped away the ice you wouldn't see a smooth empty continent You'd see a super dramatic landscape towering mountains deep valleys even fiery volcanoes In West Antarctica at least 138 volcanoes are buried under the ice One of them Mount Arabus is still active And inside it has warm volcanic caves where you could walk in a t-shirt Oh and if it wasn't weird enough Arabus is also spewing out gold Yep The actual tiny specks of gold from deep within the Earth Scientists believe this happens because magma the superheated semiolten rock beneath the Earth's surface carries liquid gold with it as it rises Every single day Arabus releases about 0.2 lb of it That's worth around 6,000 bucks per day In a year that adds up to 64 lb or more than $2 million floating into the sky Unfortunately before we grab shovels we got to remember that those are just microscopic particles They're often smaller than 60 micrometers thinner than a human hair Not even mentioning that they're scattered around up to 620 m away from the volcano itself Finding them is nearly impossible But that just shows that even in such a harsh place that looks just like a white desert there are still many fascinating mysteries to discover For example somehow life still clings there In 2017 scientists drilled deep beneath the ice of the Ross ice shelf looking for water but they found something fantastic instead A river hidden beneath 1,640 ft of ice running through the dark and inside it hundreds of tiny shrimplike creatures They swarmed around the camera blocking the lens welcoming the scientists in deep caves beneath the ice DNA evidence has also shown traces of moss algae and possibly even unknown tiny animals So turns out even in one of the harshest places on Earth life finds a way And who knows what else we'll discover in the South Pole