Today, Antarctica is a huge frozen continent, although it was once temperate enough to be covered in swamp forests. Now a team of scientists has discovered fossilized tree resin – amber – on the continent for the first time.

Researchers found amber in a sediment core recovered 3,103 feet (946 meters) beneath the embayment of the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica. The amber, the first recovered from Antarctica, could help researchers understand the ancient climate and environment of a continent now famous for its inhospitable conditions and its large numbers of penguins. The team’s research describing the discovery was published this week in Antarctic Science.

“The analyzed amber fragments provide direct insight into the environmental conditions that prevailed in West Antarctica 90 million years ago,” explains Johann Klages, marine geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute and first author of the study, within the Helmholtz association of German research centers. release. “This fascinating discovery also indicates in more detail how the forest we reconstructed in our Nature a 2020 study might have worked.

In fact, the team Nature Notebook 2020 reconstituted a temperate lowland ancient rainforest environment which existed in Antarctica between 92 and 83 million years ago. The team developed a climate model simulating the climate of this ancient past, based on a preserved network of 3-meter-long fossil roots embedded in mudstone.

The amber samples are small, having been cut when the sediment core was cut for microscopy analysis. Nonetheless, the amber “probably contains remnants of the original tree bark in the form of micro-inclusions,” study co-author Henny Gerschel said in the same release.

The new findings build on the 2020 paleo-reconstruction by describing fossilized tree resin, a remarkably valuable tool for paleontologists studying the ancient Earth. Tree resin is sticky and viscous; Many unfortunate creatures have met their end by covering themselves in substance, and when the resin hardens into amber, it impeccably preserves this organic matter.

“The amber finds directly confirm the presence of resin-producing trees that must have grown in a swampy environment,” Klages told Gizmodo in an email. “The simple fact that we were able to extract the first amber from the Antarctic continent from these sediments is spectacular. Amber has great potential for preserving pollen, spores, microorganisms, but also insects. We will now research this more closely and try to find out which particular tree may have produced the resin.

“So far, many forms of ancient life have been discovered in Antarctica, mainly preserved in the form of wood or lithified leaves, or in the form of fossil bones,” Klages added. “However, the uniqueness of our findings in this study, but primarily our major 2020 Cretaceous study in Nature that Gizmodo also covered at the time, is that these sediments were never deeply buried and therefore In fact, all fossils remain in a relatively fresh and unlithified appearance. If the amber had been buried deeper, Klages said, the team never would have found it.

In 2020, search in Proceedings of the Royal Society B presented dozens of Cretaceous amber fossils containing insects 66 million years old. The research team hopes that further amber discoveries in Antarctica will help clarify what happened to the continent’s forests and, if they’re lucky, discover an ancient creature or two.

“It was very exciting to realize that at one point in their history, all seven continents had climatic conditions that allowed resin-producing trees to survive,” Klages added. “Our goal now is to learn more about the forest ecosystem – if it burns, if we can find traces of life embedded in the amber. This discovery allows a journey into the past in another, even more direct way.

Sediment cores recovered by the team date back 90 million years, placing the age of amber squarely in the Cretaceous period, some 25 million years before iconic creatures like T. rex would disappear from the Earth.

The team also found evidence of resin leaking in the samples, which is what trees do when they protect damaged bark from pests or fire. It’s a hint at the type of activity that took place in the cold continent’s long-lost forests, although more samples would certainly help complete our portrait of prehistoric Antarctica.