ParaNormalIAm
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Member # 2683
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posted 03-01-2006 10:18 AM
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Actually wasn't Antartica warm during the Ice Age?
Neko- I hope this can help answer that. I ran a search and produced these links. It was as close as I could find.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-12/pu-aio122804.phpA great deal of evidence, such as fossils of warm-climate plants and animals, show that Antarctica was not always frigid.
The most widely accepted explanation is that around 470 million years ago what is now Antarctica was near the equator as part of Gondawana (which is sometimes called a super continent) along with what are now Australia, India, Africa and South America around it.
As Gondawana moved and broke into the continents we now know, Antarctica moved toward the South Pole, arriving there about 70 million years ago. By 45 million years ago the last of the other continents, Australia, was moving away, allowing the Southern Ocean to completely surround Antarctica. The ocean surrounding Antarctica is one of the reasons the continent is so cold.
Another theory that has been proposed is that the position of the South Pole has changed. In other words, the axis that the Earth revolves around has not always been the same. In 1997 researchers published a report in Science Magazine outlining this theory.
If the pole did change, it happened more than 200 million years ago.
Since then the Earth's temperature has gone up and down with long periods of ice ages and shorter warm periods between them. While there is still debate about when Antarctica's last warm period occurred and how warm it was, the current ice sheet that covers about 98% of Antarctica is generally believed to have started forming around 2.5 million years ago.
An interesting sidelight: When the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and the four men with him died on their way back from the South Pole in 1912, they were carrying about 35 pounds of geological specimens on the sled they were pulling. These included some of the first evidence that Antarctica has been warm at one time.
Question is; from whick part of Antarctica did these specimens come from?
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