Evidence of 90M-year-old rainforest uncovered beneath Antarctic ice

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".

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

or a stargate ;)

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

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