Three ancient pyramids have been discovered in Antarctica by a team of American and European scientists.
Two of the pyramids were “supposedly” discovered about 16 kilometers inland, while the third would be very close to the coast.
The first images of the pyramids between the ice, appeared in the Western media a year after their discovery, circumstances indicate that there may be evidence that the South Pole in the past had been quite warm to be inhabited by ancient and flourishing civilizations.
So far little is known about the pyramids, the team of explorers continues to maintain silence about the discovery.
The only reliable information provided by scientists was that they were planning an expedition to investigate and determine with certainty if the structures were of synthetic or natural origin, but to date has been disclosed yet no official confirmation.
If the researchers were able to show that the pyramids are of artificial origin, their findings could lead to a bigger and shocking review of the history of humanity.
Always in Antarctica, in 2009, scientists founded the particles of pollen in the atmosphere, a discovery that would lead to the hypothesis that once grew there palm trees and summer temperatures could reach at least 21°C.
Three years later, in 2012, scientists at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada have identified 32 species of bacteria in water samples of Lake Vida in East Antarctica.
It is difficult to believe that 50 million years ago palm trees thrived on today’s icy coasts of Antarctica.
The question then arises: is it possible that Antarctica was once warm enough so as to hosting an ancient civilization? But above all, in addition to the pyramids, what is hidden beneath that ice?
So the dilemma that still does not give us peace is: who, or what has created these pyramids in Antarctica? It is a pure invention, three mountains of natural origin, or of a disturbing reality?
Scientist Unearths a Colony of Mummified Penguins in Antarctica
Steven Emslie was finishing a season in January 2016 of researching Penguin colonies near the Antarctica-based Italian station Zucchelli. With the austral Summer quickly coming to a close and all planned work completed, Dr. Emslie, an ornithologist at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, did what any good scientist would do with a few extra days in the Antarctic: He went exploring.
On a rocky cape along the Scott Coast, he heard talk of penguin guano, but he knew no active colonies there. Curious, he arranged and searched around for a helicopter flight to the area and had a look around.
“Because over a hundred years ago Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton had visited the region and had not written about any penguins on this particular site, I did not expect to see anything because they were writing about the penguins often when they saw them,” he said.
And yet, Dr. Emslie immediately knew he had stumbled upon something intriguing when he arrived. “There were pebbles everywhere,” he recalled.
While pebbles are an everyday find on other continents, it is rare to spot them in abundance on dry land in Antarctica. A key exception is found in Adélie penguin colonies, as the birds collect the small stones from the beaches to build their nests.
The pebbles had been gathered together into nests and recently been dispersed a bit by the weather. Then Dr. Emslie saw the guano. There was a lot of dried penguin waste creating iconic white stains on the nearby rocks. Then he found the penguin corpses.
Due to the warming climate, the ice preserving the penguin corpses melted away and revealed the bodies of penguins from an ancient colony.
With feathers still intact and flesh having barely decayed, Dr. Emslie was stunned.
“I remember thinking, wow, a penguin colony that even Shackleton didn’t know about,” he said.
The shock gave way to further curiosity and led him to wonder what could possibly have befallen the colony. Fascinated, he collected some remains and took them back for carbon-dating analysis to work out when the birds had died.
With dates of death that ranged from 800 to 5,000 years ago, Dr. Emslie immediately realized that the guano, feathers, bones, and pebbles had all been locked in place under layers of ice for centuries and that the “freshly dead” penguins were in fact recently defrosted mummies that had been swallowed by advancing snowfields long ago.
Scott and Shackleton could be forgiven for not spotting this colony as it had been entirely hidden from view when the explorers had been in the region.
A mummified Adélie penguin chick, discovered under melted ice in Antarctica.
The find paints a picture of a site that, after experiencing periodic Adélie penguin occupation over thousands of years, saw that occupation come to an abrupt end approximately 800 years ago.
Dr. Emslie speculates in the journal Geology. where he reported his findings in mid-September, that cooling temperatures drove a type of sea ice to form along the coast that persisted well into summer months. Known as “fast ice” because it “fastens” to the coastline, this sea ice makes it very difficult for penguins to gain access to beaches and prevents them from colonizing places where it occurs.
He said he thought the ice forced the colony to be abandoned but also suggested that warming temperatures might change things in the years ahead.
With Antarctic ice melting and sea levels rising, established penguin colonies are being forced to disperse to new places. Dr. Emslie suggests that the penguins could then return to sites like this one.
“They need pebbles for their nests, so they are going to find all the pebbles that are already on the land at this site very attractive,” he said. “I would not be surprised to see them make this place their home again in the near future.”
Other penguin experts agree.
“We always thought Adélie penguins carried a strong impulse to return to the nesting sites they were born at year after year but, as several catastrophic ice collapses have shown us recently, they are actually pretty adaptable,” said David Ainley, a penguin ecologist at H.T. Harvey & Associates, an ecological consulting firm.
“We’ve seen that Adélies will roam the coast in small flocks and, if they find a promising-looking site like this one, they will make it their home,” he said.
600 million-year-old fossils of tiny humanoids found in Antarctica
In the rocky terrain of the Whitmore mountain range in Antarctica there have been found fossilized skeletal remains of what seems to be extremely small humans.
Tiny fossilized skeletons were found in the Whitmore mountain range
Interestingly enough, this discovery was made while yours truly was in Antarctica on assignment for The National Reporter to debunk a ridiculous tabloid story about a UFO base in the area.
While investigating this silly story with several colleagues, we happened upon a group of paleontologists who were searching for evidence that dinosaurs had once roamed the Antarctic continent before it tore loose from Africa and South America and drifted southward to its present location.
Top; Basecamp with National Reporter tent in the foreground. Bottom; Star reporter Ace Flashman walking with his investigative team.
What they found instead astonished them, not only because of what it was but because of its age.
“We tested the fossils and have determined without a shadow of a doubt that they are at least 600 million years old.” Doctor Marly of Cambridge University told us.
“600 million years ago, jellyfish first appeared. There were no human beings in the world and there wouldn’t be any for nearly five hundred and 60 million years. There weren’t even any dinosaurs around at that time.”
“The first skeleton we found was hidden within the layers of a large piece of sedimentary rock that we had broken loose from the mountainside. We knew that it would most likely contain some fossils because of its type and age.” Dr.Marly explained.
“When we split the rock apart we were completely confused. Here was this fossil from an age when the appearance of the first vertebrates was still millions of years off and it was a complete skeleton. And not only that, it appeared to be human.”
The first fossilized skeleton they found was less than a foot tall.
“The second skeleton was a very good specimen, Unlike the first one, the second skeleton was in a fully extended position with excellent detail.” Dr. Marly told us.
“It is quite obvious from our study of these skeletons that they are definitely human and not a species of primate. Who they were and how large their population was and if they were technologically advanced is a complete mystery.”
The second tiny skeleton was very well-preserved and showed quite a bit of detail.
The fossils have been flown to the National Institute of ancient studies in Washington DC for further analysis.
The National Reporter will be doing a follow-up report on this amazing discovery within the next few months.
The National Reporter would also like to stress to our readers that these tiny fossilized humanoid skeletons are not the remains of extraterrestrial aliens as we expect the tabloids will be reporting it when the news breaks.
If you encounter any stories of these fossils that claim they are extra-terrestrial in origin, please ignore them.
Antarctica exposed: Very unusual 90 million-year-old dinosaur discovery made after the scan
The group, which included researchers from Imperial College London, explored fossilized remains 30 meters below west Antarctica’s ice for 90 million years.
A study of preserved roots pollen and spores revealed that the environment at that time was much warmer than previously thought. Led by geoscientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, their work suggests summer averages in this Cretaceous environment would have been in the 20Cs (68Fs).
Their findings, published in the journal Nature online, suggests Antarctica once had a thriving rainforest.
ANTARCTICA scientists made a “very unusual” discovery dating back 90 million years to the time when dinosaurs roamed the icy continent.
A video announcing the finds, detailed earlier this month: “A mission to the Antarctic has revealed fossilized plant roots preserved deep under the ocean since the time of the dinosaurs.
“It seems this freezing landscape was once home to a lush forest.
“Johann Klages and his team set out on a ship with a special drill to extract a core of material stretching down 30 meters into the seafloor.
“Studying the core, including analysis of fossilized pollen and spores, is revealing more about the environment of this ancient rainforest.
“This was one of the warmest periods in Earth’s history, with carbon dioxide levels several times higher than they are today.”
Dr. Klages explained how the team took a CT scan of what they found.
He said: “90 million years ago, a temperate rainforest existed in West Antarctica, only 900km away from the South Pole.
“When we extracted the core, we could already see what was inside and that it was very unusual, therefore we decided to scan them in a CT scanner back home.
“What we see here is an overview of the CT-scanned core and the yellow strata that we see is the sandstone, and now we transition into the network of fossil roots, and we can nicely see how the roots are connected with each other and are pristinely preserved.
“We have thin roots, we have thick roots and it’s really a network as you would get in a forest near you if you drilled down.”
Dr. Klages said that it is likely dinosaurs would have roamed the continent more than 90 million years ago.
He added: “It revealed a very warm temperature for this latitude and annual mean temperatures that are similar to those of northern Italy.
“It would be very certain that also dinosaurs and insects lived in that environment and in an environment that was dark for about four months during the year because we have the polar light.
“These extreme greenhouse climates are important for us to understand in full detail because it allows us to look into the future of how the planet will look if we excessively emit CO2 as we do now.”
Evidence of 90-million-year-old rainforest uncovered beneath the Antarctic ice
The well-preserved rainforest seeds, pollens and spores of 90 million year old (mid-cretaceous) rainforest plants in Western Antarctica have been discovered by an international team of paleontologists and geologists.
Reconstruction of the West Antarctic mid-Cretaceous temperate rainforest. The painting is based on paleofloral and environmental information inferred from palynological, geochemical, sedimentological and organic biomarker data obtained from cores at the site of PS104_20-2, Antarctica.
The mid-Cretaceous period (115 million to 80 million years ago) was the heyday of the dinosaurs but was also the warmest period in the past 140 million years, with temperatures in the tropics as high as 35 degrees Celsius and sea level 170 m higher than today.
However, little was known about the environment south of the Antarctic Circle at this time.
Professor Tina van of Flierdt, a professor at the Departments of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, said “The survival of this 90 million-year-old forest is remarkable but even more surprising is the world that it reveals.
“Even during months of darkness, swampy temperate rainforests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than we expected.”
The evidence for the Antarctic forest comes from a core of sediment drilled at the site of PS104_20-2 (73.57°S, 107.09°W; 946 m water depth) near the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in West Antarctica.
One section of the core, that would have originally been deposited on land, caught the scientists’ attention with its strange color.
“During the initial shipboard assessments, the unusual coloration of the sediment layer quickly caught our attention; it clearly differed from the layers above it,” said Dr. Johann Klages, a geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.
The team CT-scanned the section of the core and discovered an intact 3-m-long network of fossil roots, which was so well preserved that they could make out individual cell structures.
The 90-million-year-old sample also contained countless traces of pollen and spores from plants, including the first remnants of flowering plants ever found at these high Antarctic latitudes.
“The numerous plant remains indicate that 93 to 83 million years ago the coast of West Antarctica was a swampy landscape in which temperate rainforests grew — similar to the forests that can still be found, say, on New Zealand’s South Island,” said Professor Ulrich Salzmann, a paleoecologist at Northumbria University.
Example microscopic images from thin sections of 90-million-year-old fossil roots: (a) overview scan of root fragment with indicated locations of detailed microscopic images (b-e); white arrows indicate the locations of preserved parenchyma storage cells, including potential aerenchyma gas exchange cells (d). Scale bar in (d) applies to (b-e).
To reconstruct the environment of this preserved forest, the researchers assessed the climatic conditions under which the plants’ modern descendants live, as well as analyzing temperature and precipitation indicators within the sample.
They found that the annual mean air temperature was around 12 degrees Celsius. Average summer temperatures were around 19 degrees Celsius; water temperatures in the rivers and swamps reached up to 20 degrees.
They conclude that 90 million years ago the Antarctic continent was covered with dense vegetation, there were no land-ice masses on the scale of an ice sheet in the South Pole region, and the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was far higher than previously assumed for the mid-Cretaceous period.
“Before our study, the general assumption was that the global carbon dioxide concentration in the Cretaceous was roughly 1,000 ppm,” Dr. Klages said.
“But in our model-based experiments, it took concentration levels of 1,120 to 1,680 ppm to reach the average temperatures back then in the Antarctic.”
