Antarctica was once a temperate place covered in forests and animals, part of the supercontinent Gondwana. It began to cool and move south, separating from other landmasses and becoming covered in ice about 23 million years ago. Today, it is the coldest continent on Earth and almost entirely covered in ice.
For much of the past 400 million years, Antarctica has been a temperate place, covered in forests and animals. Due to continental drift, it went from straddling the equator to being centered on the South Pole, where it is today. Today, Antarctica is the coldest continent on the planet, almost completely covered in a layer of ice and entirely devoid of animals aside from visiting penguins and a few small insects in the coastal areas.
But that wasn’t always the case. Antarctica was part of the supercontinent Gondwana, which lasted until about 160 million years ago, when it slowly began to break up. Gondwana today included most of the continents of the southern hemisphere, including South America, Africa, Arabia, India, Australia and New Zealand. Gondwana straddled the equator and was one of the world’s two supercontinents, along with Laurasia, which included present-day North America and Asia. Fossils of some of the earliest complex life forms have been found in the shallow seas that surround it.
When life first came to earth, Antarctica was one of the landmasses covered with forests and animals. Much of the fossil record of the Antarctic landmass is under the ice, but fossils, including those of dinosaurs, can be found in the Antarctic Mountains, where rocks protrude from the continent’s ice sheet.
In dinosaur times, Gondwana’s north-south orientation prevented currents from flowing at a certain latitude, instead directing them north and south over long distances. This prevented temperature differentials at a given latitude from forcing waters to a permanent hot or cold temperature, as the poles are today.
When Antarctica began to break away from the supercontinent Gondwana 160 million years ago, cooling began. It moved south, still connected to Australia and South America but separated from Africa. At this point, Antarctica still had a tropical or subtropical climate, but it was further south, near the latitude of present-day Australia. Like Australia today, the continent had marsupial fauna.
About 40 million years ago, Antarctica separated from present-day Australia and began to cool even more, its forests dying. Ice and glaciers began to cover the continent, but the end of Antarctica’s life came only about 23 million years ago, when Antarctica separated from South America and Drake Passage opened up. This has allowed for the existence of an Antarctic Circumpolar Current, a freezing current that continuously circles the continent. The result was that the continent was covered in a mile-deep layer of ice, as the snow that fell never melted. Today, Antarctica’s ice sheet contains about 70 percent of all fresh water on Earth.
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