&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "90mn years ago, 900 km from South Pole: When wildfires ripped Antarctica")
Antarctica is a frigid continent today. But millions of years ago it was covered with trees and was a tropical forest. Now, a new study has found that wildfires erupted regularly here and offers proof of the southernmost wildfires ever recorded on Earth. This is also the time dinosaurs roamed the continent during the Late Cretaceous period, 90 million years ago.
Researchers with the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, talk about the sediment cores where the proof lies in the peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment on September 7, 2026.
Rainforest in Antarctica
Scientists first stumbled upon evidence that Antarctica was a lush rainforest in 2020. A sediment core was drilled from an area that is currently in West Antarctica, with clear signs of an environment was lush and green. "In a sediment core from the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, we found an extremely well-preserved forest soil dating back around 90 million years, containing abundant pollen and spores and a dense network of roots," co-author Johann Klages of AWI said.
This sediment core was studied in detail in the latest study, where scientists found signs of recurring wildfires in Antarctica. They came across three pieces of evidence: charcoal, amber and peat moss. More charcoal fragments were found in the younger sediments. An analysis showed that it came from soft conifer wood burning at low temperatures.
Amber was fossilised tree resin which supposedly flowed over the tree trunks and sealed the fire-damaged areas. Next, they found lots of spores of peat moss, which was proof of raised bogs in Antarctica that the researchers linked to the wildfires. Peat moss is a spongy soil made from dead plant matter.
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Thunderstorms triggered wildfires in Antarctica
Ninety million years ago, Antarctica was connected to Australia with an average temperature of 12 degrees Celsius. It witnessed dry periods as well as monsoons when thunderstorms and lightning would have ignited fires in the forests. Co-author Ulrich Salzmann of Northumbria University in England said, "90 million years ago, just 900 kilometres [560 miles] from the South Pole, a temperate and very swampy Antarctic rainforest with pronounced dry and monsoon seasons gradually silted up and developed into a peatland dominated by peat mosses."
