• DOI:10.1038/s41586-020-2148-5
• Corpus ID: 214736648

Temperate rainforests near the South Pole during peak Cretaceous warmth

@article{Klages2020TemperateRN,
  title={Temperate rainforests near the South Pole during peak Cretaceous warmth},
  author={Johann Philipp Klages and Ulrich Salzmann and Torsten Bickert and C. Hillenbrand and Karsten Gohl and Gerhard Kuhn and Steven M. Bohaty and J{\"u}rgen Titschack and Juliane M{\"u}ller and Thomas Frederichs and Thorsten Bauersachs and Werner Ehrmann and Tina van de Flierdt and P. S. Pereira and Robert D. Larter and Gerrit Lohmann and Igor Niezgodzki and Gabriele Uenzelmann‐Neben and Maximilian Zundel and Cornelia Spiegel and Chris Mark and David M. Chew and Jane E. Francis and Gernot Nehrke and Florian Schwarz and James A. Smith and Tim Freudenthal and Oliver Esper and Heiko P{\"a}like and Thomas A. Ronge and Ricarda Dziadek and V. J. E. B. C. K. K. Y. F. M. Afanasyeva Arndt Ebermann Gebhardt Hochmuth K{\"u}ssne and Victoria Afanasyeva and Jan Erik Arndt and Benjamin Ebermann and Catalina Gebhardt and Katharina Hochmuth and Kevin K{\"u}ssner and Yani Najman and Florian Riefstahl and Mirko Scheinert},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2020},
  volume={580},
  pages={81-86}
}

• J. Klages, U. Salzmann, +38 authors M. Scheinert
• Published 1 April 2020
• Medicine, Geology
• Nature

The mid-Cretaceous period was one of the warmest intervals of the past 140 million years 1 – 5 , driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of around 1,000 parts per million by volume 6 . In the near absence of proximal geological records from south of the Antarctic Circle, it is disputed whether polar ice could exist under such environmental conditions. Here we use a sedimentary sequence recovered from the West Antarctic shelf—the southernmost Cretaceous record reported so far—and show that a temperate lowland rainforest environment existed at a palaeolatitude of about 82° S during the Turonian–Santonian age (92 to 83 million years ago). This record contains an intact 3-metre-long network of in situ fossil roots embedded in a mudstone matrix containing diverse pollen and spores. 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 by volume and a vegetated land surface without major Antarctic glaciation, highlighting the important cooling effect exerted by ice albedo under high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Multi-proxy core data and model simulations support the presence of temperate rainforests near the South Pole during mid-Cretaceous warmth, indicating very high CO 2 levels and the absence of Antarctic ice.