Tectonic shifts and a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide allowed the development of the mighty ice sheet, the fate of which now hangs in the balance.
Millions of years ago, Antarctica wasn’t quite the ice box it is today. While still chilly by the rest of the world’s standards, the great southern continent likely had periods of relative warmth compared to modern temperatures.
“Everything fits together by chance so that we actually get this outcome,” says Katharina Hochmuth, a geophysicist at the University of Leicester.Ice and sediment cores have long shown that large ice sheets had formed by about 34 million years ago during the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary, but researchers didn’t exactly know why they cropped up at that time.
These landmass-splitting tectonic shifts coincided with a general cooling of the Earth, which may have resulted from a decrease in global carbon dioxide levels. CO2 levels dropped through the mid- to late Eocene, reaching a low point at about 34 million years ago. Lower CO2 and colder waters off the coast helped to cool land on the southern continent. The frigid waters also aided the development and stabilization of a large ice sheet.
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