An artist’s impression of the temperate rainforest in West Antarctica 90 million years ago. Image: By Alfred-Wegener-Institut/J. McKay (Creative Commons licence)
An ice-free polar forest once flourished, helped by enough heat and ample greenhouse gas. It could come back.
Many millions of years ago, the southern continent wasn’t frozen at all, but basked in heat balmy enough for an ice-free polar forest to thrive. And ancient pre-history could repeat itself.
Climate scientists can tell you what the world could be like were today’s greenhouse gas concentrations to triple – which they could do if humans go on clearing tropical forests and burning fossil fuels.
They know because, 90 million years ago, the last time when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere went past the 1200 ppm (parts per million) mark, sea levels were 170 metres higher than today and the world was so warm that dense forests grew in what is now Antarctica.
At latitude 82 South, a region where the polar night lasts for four months, there was no icecap. Instead, the continental rocks were colonised by conifer forest, with a mix of tree ferns and an understorey of flowering shrubs.
Even though at that latitude the midday sun would have been relatively low in the sky, and the forests would have had to survive sustained winter darkness for a dozen weeks or more, average temperatures would have been that of modern day Tasmania, and a good 2C° warmer than modern Germany.
“Even during months of darkness, swampy temperate forests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than we expected”
German and British researchers report in the journal Nature that they took a closer look at a sequence of strangely-coloured mudstone in a core drilled 30 metres below the bottom of the sea floor, off West Antarctica.
The section of sediment had been preserved from the mid-Cretaceous, around 90 million years ago, in a world dominated by dinosaurs. By then, the first mammals may have evolved, the grasses were about to emerge, and seasonal flowering plants had begun to colonise a planet dominated for aeons by evergreens.
And in the preserved silt were pollens, spores, tangled roots and other plant material so well preserved that the researchers could not just identify the plant families, but even take a guess at parallels with modern forests. Before their eyes was evidence of something like the modern rainforests of New Zealand’s South Island, but deep inside the Antarctic Circle.
“Even during months of darkness, swampy temperate forests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than we expected.”
British rain levels
Somewhere between 115 and 85 million years ago, the whole world was a lot hotter: in the tropics temperatures reached 35°C and the average temperature of that part of the Antarctic was 13°C. This is at least two degrees higher than the average temperature for modern Germany.
Average temperatures in summer went up to 18.5°C, and the water temperatures in the swamps and rivers tipped 20°C, only 900 kms from the then South Pole. Modern Antarctica is classed as desert, with minimal precipitation: then it would have seen 1120 mm a year. People from southwestern Scotland or parts of Wales would have felt at home.
It is an axiom of earth science that the present is key to the past: if such forests today can flourish at existing temperatures, then the same must have been true in the deep past.
So climate scientists from the start have taken a close interest in the evidence of intensely warm periods in the fossil record: a mix of plant and animal remains, the ratio of chemical isotopes preserved in rock, and even the air bubbles trapped in deep ice cores can help them reconstruct the temperatures, the composition of the atmosphere and the rainfall of, for example, the warmest periods of the Pliocene, when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere tipped the 1000 ppm mark, and average planetary temperatures rose by 9°C.
Prehistoric encore approaching?
In the past century, atmospheric CO2 levels have swollen from 285 ppm to more than 400 ppm, and the planetary thermometer has already crept up by 1°C above the level for most of human history. If human economies continue burning fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate, the conditions that prevailed 56 million years ago could return by 2159.
The Cretaceous evidence will help climate scientists calibrate their models of a world in which greenhouse gas emissions go on rising.
“Before our study, the general assumption was that the global carbon dioxide concentration in the Cretaceous was roughly 1000 ppm,” said Johann Klages, of the Alfred Wegener Institute centre for polar and marine research in Germany, who led the study.
“But in our model-based experiments, it took concentration levels of 1120 to 1680 ppm to reach the average temperatures back then in Antarctica.” – Climate News Network
About the Author
Tim Radford is a freelance journalist. He worked for The Guardian for 32 years, becoming (among other things) letters editor, arts editor, literary editor and science editor. He won the Association of British Science Writers award for science writer of the year four times. He served on the UK committee for the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. He has lectured about science and the media in dozens of British and foreign cities.
Book by this Author:
Science that Changed the World: The untold story of the other 1960s revolution by Tim Radford.
Climate Adaptation Finance and Investment in California
by Jesse M. Keenan This book serves as a guide for local governments and private enterprises as they navigate the unchartered waters of investing in climate change adaptation and resilience. This book serves not only as a resource guide for identifying potential funding sources but also as a roadmap for asset management and public finance processes. It highlights practical synergies between funding mechanisms, as well as the conflicts that may arise between varying interests and strategies. While the main focus of this work is on the State of California, this book offers broader insights for how states, local governments and private enterprises can take those critical first steps in investing in society’s collective adaptation to climate change. Available On Amazon
Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas: Linkages between Science, Policy and Practice
by Nadja Kabisch, Horst Korn, Jutta Stadler, Aletta Bonn This open access book brings together research findings and experiences from science, policy and practice to highlight and debate the importance of nature-based solutions to climate change adaptation in urban areas. Emphasis is given to the potential of nature-based approaches to create multiple-benefits for society.
The expert contributions present recommendations for creating synergies between ongoing policy processes, scientific programmes and practical implementation of climate change and nature conservation measures in global urban areas. Available On Amazon
A Critical Approach to Climate Change Adaptation: Discourses, Policies and Practices
by Silja Klepp, Libertad Chavez-Rodriguez This edited volume brings together critical research on climate change adaptation discourses, policies, and practices from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Drawing on examples from countries including Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Russia, Tanzania, Indonesia, and the Pacific Islands, the chapters describe how adaptation measures are interpreted, transformed, and implemented at grassroots level and how these measures are changing or interfering with power relations, legal pluralismm and local (ecological) knowledge. As a whole, the book challenges established perspectives of climate change adaptation by taking into account issues of cultural diversity, environmental justicem and human rights, as well as feminist or intersectional approaches. This innovative approach allows for analyses of the new configurations of knowledge and power that are evolving in the name of climate change adaptation. Available On Amazon
From The Publisher: Purchases on Amazon go to defray the cost of bringing you InnerSelf.comelf.com, MightyNatural.com, and ClimateImpactNews.com at no cost and without advertisers that track your browsing habits. Even if you click on a link but don't buy these selected products, anything else you buy in that same visit on Amazon pays us a small commission. There is no additional cost to you, so please contribute to the effort. You can also use this link to use to Amazon at any time so you can help support our efforts.