I wonder what fossil treasures are sitting beneath the ice in Antarctica. Most people don't realize how massive the continent is since it doesn't show up fully on maps - it is nearly 1.5 times the size of America.

If it was a wetter, warmer place millions of years ago, it would have been teeming with life.

Just to clarify because it was unclear to me and areas are unintuitive with map projections, it's 1.5 times the size of the United States. The U.S is ~10 million km^2, Antarctica 14 million km^2, and the American continent 42 million km^2

Sizes compared: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc1MjkzMTg.MTg2MDcyNg*...

Warning: link hijacks history.

Just to clarify because it was unclear to me, that's North and South Americas together that make up 42 million km^2. North America alone makes up 24,7 million km^2.

Some parts of the world consider the Americas one continent. See here, for example: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEurope/comments/7nuqu2/are_the_a...

Yep, for us in Italy the continents are 5: America, Eurasia, Antarctica, Africa, Oceania (Australia + New Zealand + several minor isles).

Geographically speaking, we then have North America (Canada, USA), Central America (Mexico to strait of Panama), South America, and Caribbeans.

I've always thought a few school subjects should be put off until kids are mature enough to "get" them.

One is history class (much more meaningful when you are old enough to understand human nature) and another is mercator projections.

I always thought Canada was so much bigger than the US but they're about the same size - 3.5m sq miles.

> another is mercator projections.

That's why for centuries the globes were both produced and used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel

Globes -- since 1492. Every child can understand that.

One of my memories that always makes me chuckle was an argument I had with my older sibling about this. I always thought Canada was bigger than the US, but only based on how long it takes to get between city centers in the middle part.

Population density was hard for 9 year old me to grasp. But oh, boy, was I certain I was right.

> I always thought Canada was so much bigger than the US but they're about the same size - 3.5m sq miles.

You can thank Mercator for that. And, these days, Google and Apple for still using it (Google Maps is a globe on PC but still Mercator on iOS. Apple Maps is Mercator only).

> I always thought Canada was so much bigger than the US but they're about the same size - 3.5m sq miles

That's because the largest state, Alaska, appears like its a part of the Canadian landmass

I think this shows it best:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Worlds_a...

Does that include Greenland? - which is part of the America continent.

How strange that, of all 35 sovereign nations in the Americas, it's the citizens of the only one to have "America" in its name that call their country America!

It must be an obsession, because it couldn't be the desire to carve five syllables off our nine-syllable mouthful of a legal name.

I mean. I guess we could just call ourselves the Union, for short. Or the States, something like that.

But definitely not all three. That would just be silly.

You're really stretching with the word "obsession", not to mention being inflammatory. It's an abbreviation that happens to lose specificity (as you might expect of an abbreviation - therefore, one must depend on context). In addition, it's a gonna globally common abbreviation. I'm sure the relative commonness of "the US" is higher outside the US, but many people outside the US still call it America too.

Which makes a great point about how big Canada is compared to the US. We seem to misuse the term "America" to point only to one part of one of the Americas. Maybe it would be actually less confusing if we would refer to North America as the Canada continent? It would reduce the name conflicts by half and we would use as proxy the biggest country on the continent. There would also be the additional benefit of people not refering to Texas as "South America".

We could then call South America South Canadia.

Bear in mind that underneath the ice, Antarctica is an archipelago, not a continuous land mass.

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18757/what...

My understand is this is largely because the land mass was pressed down by kilometers of ice. With the ice gone we can expect it to spring up very quickly same way Scandinavia did and is to some extent still doing today.

I have no idea how much can be expected to come up but my very quick and inaccurate estimation would be something like 1/8th to 1/5th of the ice thickness pressing it down.

If the land mass springs up, does somewhere (everywhere?) else on the planet drift down to make up for the change in volume?

Indeed. It's one of the Atlantis theories. Idea is that as North American ice disappeared the land lifted up, Atlantis was on the other end of that plate and went down into the sea respectively.

Randall Carlson has some interesting theories.

Keep in mind that "spring up very quickly" to a geologist is on the order of inches per year.

There are several places currently where glaciers have melted and are experience uplifts on the order of inches a year.

> I wonder what fossil treasures are sitting beneath the ice in Antarctica.

It's well understood that the arctic and antarctic has tons of oil. The arctic by itself is thought to have 22% of the world's oil/gas.

"The United States Geological Survey estimates that 22 percent of the world's oil and natural gas could be located beneath the Arctic"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_resources_of_the_Arcti...

But antarctica is more remote than the arctic and has extremely harsh weather/terrain/etc so it will probably be the last place exploited for resources. I doubt there will be mining or drilling for oil in antarctica anytime soon, if ever. The arctic is a different matter altogether.

Why are people downvoting this? It's the real danger of finding a rain forrest beneath antarctica. Of course the oil companies already know about it.

Maybe we're too cynical but money runs the world and money will eventually bypass all environmental protections and start drilling antarctica unless we switch to more reusable energy before that.

Oil in Antarctica won't happen because of the price of running and shipping things down there. It's way different than finding a new oilfield in a country with roads and an established supply chain. I don't even think you could build pipelines that go from fields to a shipping port because of the snow and ice.

It's still teeming with life. Antarctica has more than 400 known subglacial lakes, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok

Life would have also been much different, because it still would have needed to survive for months without sun.

Iirc, there are fossils of polar dinosaurs with very big eyes, a bit like deep sea creatures tend to have big eyes.

This sounds interesting, so I googled it. One of the finds: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-strange-lives-of-...

That is an interesting thought and one can only imagine the possibilities. It could alter a lot of what we know already.

One explanation would be Earth’s spin axis was in a different spot millions of years ago due to polar shift.

Related research:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/millions-of-yea...

The explanation is that the antarctic tectonic plate wasn't where it is now. Plus we've been in an ice age for like 2.5 million years. So when the plate that currently covers the south pole was closer to the equator and the temperature of the earth was substantially warmer at the same time, then it had a rainforest.

Antarctica has been at the (current) south pole for >100 million years

I thought it was nearer 90M years. Which matches up with the sample pretty good.

True polar wander sounds like one of the most terrifying natural disasters I could imagine.

Gradual polar shift happens over millions of years; specifically characteristic rate of true polar wander is 1° or less per million years.

If the shifting occurs as a “Cataclysmic” polar shift [1] or geomagnetic reversal [2], the periodic reversal of the Earth's magnetic field (effectively switching the north and south magnetic poles) — I agree that it would likely have terrifying results for the inhabitants of Earth.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypot...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal

I mean, it's a very slow motion disaster -- so slow it can't be a disaster for us.

I was wondering how they knew it was climate change and not continental drift and it seems like Antarctica hasn’t moved much in the last 100 million years.

Now if we would only get to work on global warming we could restore the Antarctic jungle to its proper Mesozoic glory.

Original paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2148-5

>"A climate model simulation shows that the reconstructed temperate climate at this high latitude requires a combination of both atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 1,120–1,680 parts per million"

Does this allow for other methods of warming? Does it assume that all things would be equal except for carbon dioxide levels? If so, why?

On this topic, check out the recent PBS Nova: Polar Extremes which discusses the climatic history of the earth and findings such as this one.

You can watch it here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/polar-extremes/

If you get blocked because of region; New York works.

S46E27

Fortunately some of those genus survived up to our time, including the only parasite conifer known that is alive. Plants in those forests would look like this:

https://www.junglegardens.org/blog-posts/2018/12/3/the-asian...

Anyone else wonder what kind of horrors are currently frozen down there. I’m thinking smallpox and other problems we believed were gone for good.

Would an ancient virus be any harm to modern humans? Or would we be too different to what was around millions of years ago for it to be a le to survive and infect people?

I think so. We can be modern, but we still breath exactly like any other mammal, including prehistoric species. Our methabolic routes are shared with lots of other species, extant and extinct

I'm guessing all kinds of viruses and bacteria that evolved to infect whatever was living 90mil years ago.

But there's always a chance of also finding a buried spaceship.

or a stargate ;)

If Earth's ice caps' ice cover were to melt, how much landmass would that uncover? ice-cap - ice + water = ?

There is so much ice in Antarctica (up to 4776m thick! [1]) that a large amount of what seems like it would be land is actually below sea level (it's massively weighed down, and some would rebound over time [2]). Here are some estimates of what would be left at first: https://vectormap.info/vector-maps-manual/map-antarctica-wit... and https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/pvqpg/the_archipel...

[1] http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/environment/se...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound

Antarctica is about 150% the size of Europe.

The combination of melted ice and thermal expansion would mean that a lot of it would be flooded.