Scientists just made an incredible discovery in Antarctica—they found Pine Island amber, a super rare type of fossilized tree resin! This amber is millions of years old and could hold clues about ancient ecosystems that once thrived on the frozen continent. Imagine finding tiny prehistoric insects or pollen trapped inside, perfectly preserved from a time when Antarctica was much warmer. This discovery could rewrite what we know about Earth’s climate history and how plants and animals adapted to extreme changes. Scientists are now carefully studying the amber to uncover its secrets. Who knows what mysteries could be hiding inside?
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Credit:
Gondwana: By Fama Clamosa, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67001070
Animation is created by Bright Side.
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Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/
Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV
Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz
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https://www.shutterstock.com
https://www.eastnews.ru
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For more videos and articles visit:
http://www.brightside.me
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This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.
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00:00Antarctica, a snowy world of about minus 46 degrees Fahrenheit, covered in ice for millions
00:07of years.
00:08But it wasn't always this way.
00:10Scientists just found something buried deep beneath the seafloor that shouldn't exist.
00:15Tiny golden droplets of amber.
00:19This means that Antarctica was once teeming with life and thick with trees.
00:24But something happened to it.
00:26That could reshape the way we see our own future.
00:32Antarctica has been a land of howling winds for millions of years.
00:35No tree can grow here today.
00:37But scientists who studied those lands decided to drill deep beneath the Antarctic surface.
00:44They went thousands of feet below the ice, pulling up ancient layers of sediment.
00:49And there, trapped in time, they found tiny pieces of golden amber.
00:55Amber is basically fossilized tree resin.
00:59It's found all over the world, often with perfectly preserved pieces of ancient life.
01:05Insects trapped mid-flight, pollen, frozen in time.
01:09Entire tiny ecosystems can be locked inside golden droplets.
01:13In every continent, but not in Antarctica.
01:16Until now.
01:19They discovered tiny specks from 0.5 to 1 millimeter in size.
01:25Smaller than a grain of sand, but with huge significance.
01:29This droplet had once oozed from the bark of a tree about 90 million years ago.
01:35What's even wilder, amber is only produced by certain types of trees.
01:40The ones that grow in humid, temperate rainforests and jungles.
01:45That's when the realization hit.
01:47Antarctica used to be a rainforest.
01:52Those tiny flecks of amber, clearly seen only under a microscope, tell us a vivid story
01:58of a living and breathing ecosystem.
02:01Around 90 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, Antarctica
02:08could have been covered in lush, swampy forests filled with towering conifers, ferns, and
02:13ancient plants.
02:16Some of the fragments showed signs of damage.
02:19That means the trees that produced them had been injured, perhaps by wildfires or parasites.
02:26Though despite that, and despite the fact it spent millions of years on the seafloor,
02:31this amber was almost perfectly preserved.
02:34Solid, transparent, and free of cracks.
02:38Normally, amber buried under extreme pressure and heat just crashes over time.
02:44But this piece, it survived.
02:46That means other pieces could survive as well, and we might find more of them on the ocean
02:50floor.
02:52But this wasn't the first sign that Antarctica had once been a different place entirely.
02:59It started in 2017.
03:01A team of scientists drilled deep into the seabed near Pine Island Glacier on Antarctica's
03:07west coast.
03:08They pulled up sediment cores, long cylindrical samples of Earth that had been buried for
03:14millions of years.
03:16And it was insane.
03:18Inside these layers they found fossilized roots, pollen, spores, traces of an ancient
03:23forest that had once thrived here.
03:26And that's exactly what they'd been studying ever since then.
03:30In order not to damage anything, they had to spend years of hard work, breaking down
03:35the sediment into thousands of tiny pieces, and scanning them all under fluorescent microscopes.
03:42The same team also found another piece of the puzzle back in 2020.
03:47They found more sedimentary samples from the ocean floor that pointed to a land of dense
03:52trees, rivers, and wetlands.
03:55A world that looked more like the Pacific Northwest, or New Zealand.
04:00But why was Antarctica so warm back then?
04:03Well, that's all because of the atmosphere.
04:06Ninety million years ago, Earth's carbon dioxide levels were terrifyingly high.
04:12It was literally one of the warmest periods in history, with temperatures soaring even
04:16at the poles.
04:18Think about it, Antarctica had no ice caps.
04:23Instead it could have had buzzing insects and maybe even dinosaurs wandering through
04:27its forests.
04:29But in order to learn what happened to them, the team has to find more evidence.
04:35Antarctica really is a place full of mysteries.
04:38It's hard to study because it's covered in snow and ice so much that we don't even know
04:42its true shape and size.
04:45Some parts of the ice sheet are over 3 miles thick, half the depth of the Mariana Trench,
04:51the deepest trench on Earth.
04:53Luckily, snow has a great quality.
04:56It can freeze things in time perfectly.
04:59Layer by layer, year after year, it buries nature's past like a time capsule.
05:05At first, fresh snow is soft and shifts easily in the wind, full of air.
05:10But as more snow piles on top, it compresses, squeezing out the air pockets and hardening
05:15into dense ice.
05:18This freezing pressure locks everything inside.
05:21It traps all the air in the snow, which is why it's so hard to see the ice sheet.
05:26But if you look closely, you'll see that it's not just the ice sheet that's frozen.
05:31This freezing pressure locks everything inside.
05:34It traps ancient plants, animals, and even entire landscapes.
05:39And they literally get frozen in time, because the extreme cold slows down decay.
05:46It stops bacteria growth, preventing rot, and keeping things almost perfectly intact
05:52for thousands, sometimes even millions of years.
05:57That's exactly what's going on in Antarctica.
06:00Scientists have to literally scan it all the way down this snow in order to find what
06:04this place looked like millions of years ago.
06:08What they've found is an entire lost world, buried under miles of ice.
06:14It was beneath the thickest ice of East Antarctica, near the Aurora and Schmidt subglacial basins.
06:21The weight of the ice has been so immense for so long that it actually protected the
06:26land from erosion.
06:29Scientists call it the Ghost of Antarctica's Landscape, and it's nothing like the smooth,
06:35flat wasteland seen from above.
06:37They've found rivers that once flowed freely, now frozen in place, valleys carved by water,
06:44even three massive, sharply peaked hills.
06:47But what are they?
06:51To understand that, we need to go even further back in time, to the era when Antarctica was
06:57still part of a lost supercontinent.
07:02Hundreds of millions of years ago, the land we now call Antarctica was part of Gondwana,
07:07an enormous supercontinent that included South America.
07:11Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica all fused together.
07:18But as Earth's tectonic plates slowly drifted apart, Gondwana broke into pieces.
07:25Antarctica was ripped apart, its land stretched and fractured.
07:30The massive ice sheets that formed later covered these broken landmasses, preserving them like
07:36frozen fossils.
07:38As the ice shifted and melted over time, valleys formed, and ancient rivers likely carried
07:44water toward a coast that was hundreds of miles away from where it is now.
07:49But that's not the only thing Antarctica has hidden.
07:53If you stripped away the ice, you wouldn't see a smooth, empty continent.
07:57You'd see a super dramatic landscape, towering mountains, deep valleys, even fiery volcanoes!
08:07In West Antarctica, at least 138 volcanoes are buried under the ice.
08:12One of them, Mount Erebus, is still active, and inside, it has warm volcanic caves where
08:18you could walk in a t-shirt!
08:21Oh, and if it wasn't weird enough, Erebus is also spewing out gold!
08:26Yep, the actual tiny specks of gold from deep within the Earth!
08:31Scientists believe this happens because magma, the superheated, semi-molten rock beneath
08:36the Earth's surface, carries liquid gold with it as it rises.
08:41Every single day, Erebus releases about 0.2 pounds of it.
08:46That's worth around 6,000 bucks per day!
08:49In a year, that adds up to 64 pounds, or more than $2 million, floating into the sky!
08:56Unfortunately, before we grab shovels, we gotta remember that those are just microscopic
09:02particles.
09:03They're often smaller than 60 micrometers, thinner than a human hair.
09:08Not even mentioning that they're scattered around, up to 620 miles away from the volcano
09:13itself, finding them is nearly impossible!
09:18But that just shows that even in such a harsh place that looks just like a white desert,
09:22there are still many fascinating mysteries to discover.
09:27For example, somehow, life still clings there!
09:31In 2017, scientists drilled deep beneath the ice of the Ross Ice Shelf looking for water,
09:38but they found something fantastic instead!
09:41A river, hidden beneath 1,640 feet of ice, running through the dark.
09:48And inside it, hundreds of tiny shrimp-like creatures.
09:52They swarmed around the camera, blocking the lens, welcoming the scientists.
09:57In deep caves beneath the ice, DNA evidence has also shown traces of moss, algae, and
10:03possibly even unknown tiny animals.
10:07Well, turns out, even in one of the harshest places on Earth, life finds a way.
10:13And who knows what else we'll discover in the South Pole!