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

The researchers discovered the amber in a sediment core recovered from 3,103 feet (946 meters) below the floor 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 many, many penguins. The team’s research describing the discovery was published this week in Antarctic Science.

“The amber fragments analyzed allow direct insight into the environmental conditions that prevailed in West Antarctica 90 million years ago,” says Johann Klages, marine geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute and first author of the study, in a Helmholtz Association of Centers of German Research. release. “This fascinating discovery also indicates in more detail how we rebuilt the forest here Nature the 2020 study might have worked.”

Indeed, of the team 2020 Nature paper rebuilt year ancient lowland temperate rainforest environment which existed in Antarctica between 92 and 83 million years ago. The team developed a climate model to simulate the climate of that ancient past, based on a preserved network of 10-foot-long (3-meter-long) fossil roots embedded in mudstone.

Amber samples are small, having been cut to size when the sediment core was cut for microscopic analysis. However, the amber “probably contains remnants of the original tree bark as micro-inclusions,” study co-author Henny Gerschel said in the same statement.

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 being covered in the stuff, and when the resin hardens into amber, it preserves that organic matter immaculate.

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

“Until now, a lot of ancient life has been discovered in Antarctica, mostly preserved in the form of lithified wood or leaves or as fossil bones,” added Klages. “However, the uniqueness of our findings in this study, but mainly our major 2020 Cretaceous study in Nature, which Gizmodo also covered then, is that these sediments were never deeply buried, and because of that, all fossil remains have a relatively fresh unlithified appearance.” If the amber had been buried deeper, Klages said, the team would never have found it.

In 2020, research in Proceedings of the Royal Society B presented dozens of fossils of Cretaceous amber containing insects 66 million years old. The research team’s hope is that more Antarctic amber finds will shed light on what happened to the continent’s forests, and if they’re lucky, they’ll find an ancient creature or two.

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

Sediment cores recovered by the team date back 90 million years, placing the amber’s age precisely in the Cretaceous period, about 25 million years before such iconic creatures as T. rex would disappear from the Earth.

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