Geologists Have Discovered 280-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Forest In Antartica

Most of us know that Antarctica is a frosty wilderness covered in thick compacted ice. 280-million-year-old tree fossils, Which is believed to be evidence of the oldest polar forest, have been discovered by the team of Geologists in Antartica. This can be thougt as dating back to before the first dinosaurs walked the Earth. Now the team is braving the land of ice once more to uncover clues as to how forests once flourished there.

During the Permian Period, Antarctica was much warmer than it is today. At the time, Antarctica was then still part of Gondwana, the Southern Hemisphere's supercontinent that incorporated present-day Africa, South America, Arabia, India and Australia. There would have been a mixture of mosses and ferns and the geologists believe forest stretched across the entirety of Gondwana. The team of scientists found that these trees were able to transition from summer activity to dormancy during the winter perhaps as quickly as within a month. In a separate interview with CNN, Prof Gulbranson said that dating the fossils was one of his team's biggest challenges. He added that recent findings indicated the polar forest was about 280 million years old but that a margin of error could make the trees up to 20 million years older or younger. (Erik Gulbranson on site in Antarctica)