Giant river system that existed 40 million years ago discovered deep below Antarctic ice

Geologists digging into the massive ice sheet of West Antarctica have discovered the remains of an ancient river system that once flowed for nearly a thousand miles.

Between 34 million to 44 million years ago, an epoch known as the middle-to-late Eocene, Earth's atmosphere transformed drastically. As carbon dioxide levels plummeted, global cooling triggered the formation of glaciers on an ice-free Earth. In 2017, Klages and other scientists onboard the research vessel Polarstern expedition traversed from the southernmost part of Chile, across the rough Drake Passage and into the western part of the icy continent. Equipped with advanced seafloor drilling equipment, Klages and his team set out to collect cores from soft sediments and hard rocks within the frozen seabed.

By calculating the half-life of radioactive elements, such as the ratio of uranium and lead in the sediment, they found that the lower part of the sediment was formed during the mid-Creatceous period, about 85 million years ago. This sediment contained fossils, spores and pollens characteristic of a temperate rainforest, which existed at that time. The upper part of the sediment contained mostly sand from the mid-to-late Eocene epoch, about 30 million to 40 million years ago.

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