Was Antarctica Ever Warm?
For much of the last 400 million years, Antarctica has been a temperate place, covered with forests and animals. Due to continental drift, it has moved from straddling the equator to being centered on the South Pole, where it is today. Today, Antarctica is the coldest continent on the planet, almost completely covered in a layer of ice, and entirely lacking in animals aside from visiting penguins and a few small bugs in the coastal areas. But it wasn’t always that way. Antarctica was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana, which lasted up until about 160 million years ago, when it slowly began to break up. Gondwana included most of the continents in the southern hemisphere today, including South America, Africa, Arabia, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Gondwana straddled the equator and was one of the world’s two supercontinents, along with Laurasia, which included present-day North America and Asia. Fossils of some of the earliest complex life have been found in the shallow seas s
