Fossil forests under Antarctic ice (University of Melbourne). Australian researchers tell about the arduous expedition they took in 2001 to look for fossils in a remote part of Antarctica. They had to travel through Drake’s Passage, “the most treacherous stretch of water in the world,” but their trials were only beginning.
Together with Dame Professor Jane Francis from the British
Antarctic Survey and with the help of our mountaineer, Robert Smith, we endured quad bikes bogged in mud, extreme 100 knot winds that constantly beat against our tents during a three-day blizzard, and were nearly stranded on Seymour Island for the entire winter when the sea ice choked the ship’s passage through the Antarctic Sound between Elephant Island and the main peninsula.
Despite the ordeal, they successfully collected fossil leaves from Seymour Island to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula. Apparently they have been studying the fossils ever since. Fitting the leaves into the evolutionary timeline, they state that “They are evidence that extensive forests grew at high latitudes during the late Paleocene (around 58–56 million years ago).”
These beautiful impressions of leaves, preserved in fine-
grained sandstones and siltstones, are the best-preserved Antarctic Peninsula flora from the Paleocene. They show significant diversity of leaf architecture – shape, size, patterns of leaf veins – despite growing in the polar region, where low angles of light are experienced during winter.
The presence of temperate forests in what today is the coldest part of the world means that earth has experienced dramatic climate change in the past. Secular scientists have this all worked out on their timeline, with names for the climate changes:
The Paleocene was a time that experienced rapid warming, leading into the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM in Figure 1) that saw a dramatic temperature increase of 8°C over 10,000 years, a mere blink of an eye in geological time.
This was followed by the warmest time of the Cenozoic Era, during a period known as the Eocene greenhouse, before Earth cooled and the ice caps first formed approximately 34 million years ago, caused by the break-up of Gondwana.
The names confer an appearance of history, but what do they really know? Certainly the discovery of plant materials, particularly leaves from temperate climates, were not expected when they were first found in 1833. These were big specimens, too, comparable to some of the large flowering trees of Australia and New Zealand, like giant kauri trees and eucalyptus trees.
We now know that fossils are, in fact, abundant in Antarctica, and the most common are of wood and leaves. They are evidence of what is called the Antarctic Paradox –how can forests be preserved on a continent that experiences temperatures as low as -83 °C and is covered in thick ice sheets?
Part of the paradox is the condition of the fossils. They are
The research paper is published in Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, February 2021: Tosolini et al, “Paleocene high-latitude leaf flora of Antarctica Part 1: entire-margined angiosperms.”
......they toss millions of years around like dollar bills, drawn from their reckless drafts on the bank of time. They cannot say that the fossils on Seymour Island are contemporaneous with the Permian fossils, because flowering plants had supposedly not evolved by then. Consequently, they have to invent multiple warming periods separated by hundreds of millions of years in order to get these trees to grow in the land of the midnight sun.
The secular timeline makes no sense if they can still extract amino acids from some of the oldest wood fossils. It’s interesting that the forests do not appear to have grown in situ. They admit that the fossils resemble the Yellowstone fossil forests, which geologists now believe were rafted into their current positions. A simpler interpretation without the extreme climate swings is that the plant material was rafted into these locations by the Flood. The extreme dynamics of a global flood could have carried rafts of vegetation far from their place of origin, depositing perfectly-preserved leaves in “layers of fine-grained sandstones and siltstones” instead of soil. Creation geologists and botanists should lead the secularists out of their slavery to Pharaoh Darwin into the promised land.
Noticed in passing: the press releases admit to dramatic warming
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is a fascinating time and one of the most dramatic and rapid warming events in Earth’s history. Although it pales in comparison to the rate of modern, human-induced warming, it is possibly our best analogue for Earth’s future climate.
Man must be blamed! We must not upset the activists in Paris!" CEH