The study is the first integrated reconstruction of its kind for the Iberian Peninsula, and it tackles a question that has divided palaeoecologists for decades: were the treeless pastures of the Pyrenean subalpine belt opened by herders, or did climate do the heavy lifting? Traditional indicators of human activity in pollen records, such as cereal-type grains or plantain pollen, can be ambiguous in the Mediterranean region, because some of the same taxa also respond to natural climatic shifts. By layering multiple independent proxies from the same lake core, the researchers hoped to separate those signals with greater confidence than any single method allows.

The team retrieved two pairs of sediment cores from the lake’s deepest point in October 2020 and 2021, using a floating platform. Each core measured about nine metres long. The chronological backbone of the study rests on twenty-two radiocarbon dates processed at a laboratory in Seattle, woven into a Bayesian age-depth model that accounts for a sedimentary hiatus between roughly 20,000 and 15,000 years ago, when the lake appears to have been frozen for most of the year under glacial conditions. The uppermost two core sections showed signs of reworking and were excluded from the biological analyses to avoid distorting the record.

During the Last Glacial Maximum and the Lateglacial, the landscape around the lake was treeless and cold. Pollen from pine, wormwood, jointfir and goosefoot family plants dominated, consistent with other glacial-era records across the Pyrenees. When the Bølling warming arrived around 14,700 years ago, scattered pine formations persisted in an open steppe. The subsequent Allerød and Younger Dryas intervals are harder to read at this site because sedimentation rates were low, but the presence of deciduous oak and hazel pollen hints that tree populations survived nearby in regional refugia, supporting the idea that southern Europe served as a glacial sanctuary for temperate species.

The Early Holocene brought a dramatic transformation. As deglacial warming took hold, a mixed forest dominated by birch replaced the pine communities, an unusual pattern compared with other Pyrenean sites where hazel typically takes that role. The researchers propose that regular, low-intensity fires, probably ignited naturally by summer thunderstorms under a Mediterranean-influenced climate, gave pioneer birch an edge over hazel, which recovers more slowly after disturbance. Charcoal records show continuous fire occurrence through this period, yet the width-to-length ratio of charcoal particles indicates that grasses, not trees, were the main fuel, painting a picture of frequent but gentle ground fires in a landscape of high forest biomass.

The pivotal shift came around 8,200 years ago. An abrupt and sustained decline in plant biomass, recorded in pollen accumulation rates, coincides with a well-known cooling event that marks the start of the Mid-Holocene. Fire activity dropped sharply, and no fire episodes were detected for roughly seven centuries, suggesting cold, arid conditions had simply left too little fuel to burn. Crucially, no domestic animal DNA or clear anthropogenic indicators appear in the record at this stage, so the initial thinning of the forest cannot be blamed on people.

Then, between about 6,500 and 6,000 years ago, the story changes. Sedimentary ancient DNA from the cores revealed the first evidence of cattle and sheep around the lake, the earliest such continuous record of livestock in the Iberian Holocene. Runoff-dominated sediment layers signal increased erosion in the catchment, plant productivity declined across all vegetation types, and a cluster of fire episodes appeared precisely when a cave-based temperature reconstruction from the region shows its lowest Holocene values. The researchers interpret this conjunction as evidence that Neolithic pastoralists opportunistically exploited open ground created by climatic cooling, using fire to keep it open for grazing. Neither driver alone, they argue, explains the full pattern.

The Late Holocene deepened the human imprint. After about 4,000 years ago, charcoal accumulation reached its highest values around 2,100 years ago, and charcoal morphology shifted from herbaceous to woody fuel, indicating less frequent but more severe burns. Wild mammals such as red deer and brown bear, detected through DNA in older sediments, gave way to persistent livestock. Pollen of cereals and plantain climbed to their record highs. The authors also raise the possibility of selective management: deciduous oaks, whose acorns could have been valued as fodder, resist fire by resprouting and may have been deliberately spared, a practice echoing what landscape ecologists have called landscape fruiting. Meanwhile, the continued local presence of fire-sensitive fir suggests human impact never crossed the threshold that would have eliminated such vulnerable communities.

Perhaps the most methodologically interesting result is the comparison between pollen and sedimentary ancient DNA. The two proxies often disagreed. Anthropogenic taxa appear throughout the pollen record but only emerge in the DNA data around 6,000 years ago, implying that coarse pollen categories may overestimate early human influence by lumping in naturally occurring plants. Grasses, which dominate grazing diets, were underrepresented in the DNA record despite their prolific pollen, ruling out animal droppings as a major DNA source at this site. Tree taxa showed both convergent and divergent patterns depending on their pollen productivity. The researchers conclude that the two approaches are complementary, with DNA capturing local vegetation and pollen integrating the regional picture, though they caution that the taphonomy of lake sediment DNA still needs more study.

The implications reach into present-day conservation policy. The Pyrenean subalpine belt was grazed under transterminance, a system of short-distance seasonal livestock movement, until land abandonment in the last century triggered widespread reforestation. If these open landscapes are cultural artefacts sustained by millennia of low-intensity stewardship, as this study suggests, then protecting them may require deliberately emulating traditional grazing and burning practices rather than simply excluding human activity. The authors note that modern warming, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and contemporary land-use pressures complicate direct translation of the past into management prescriptions. Still, their reconstruction supports the view that the Pyrenees host human-shaped biodiversity hotspots, and that without integrated management, rising temperatures could accelerate woody encroachment, elevate wildfire risk and quietly erase four millennia of ecological heritage.

Subject of Research: A 25,000-year multiproxy lake sediment reconstruction of climate and human interactions in the Pyrenean subalpine belt

Article Title: Human and climate-environment interactions in Pyrenean landscapes: a Lateglacial-Holocene multiproxy reconstruction

Article References: Julián-Posada, I., Gil-Romera, G., Moreno, A., Leys, B., Valero-Garcés, B., & González-Sampériz, P. (2026). Human and climate-environment interactions in Pyrenean landscapes: a Lateglacial-Holocene multiproxy reconstruction. Biogeosciences, 23(20), 7411-7446. https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-23-7411-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/bg-23-7411-2026

Keywords: Pyrenees, palaeoecology, sedimentary ancient DNA, pollen analysis, charcoal, Holocene, Neolithic pastoralism, fire history, Tramacastilla Lake, landscape management, Biogeosciences, Human

The central finding is stark: in the absence of human ignition, Amazonian forest fires rarely, if ever, start and spread on their own. Before people arrived in South America during the late Pleistocene, paleoecological records show little to no fire. Sediment cores from Serra Sul dos Carajás in drier eastern Amazonia lacked fire at some sites until the deglacial period and the onset of the Holocene, and where glacial-age fire did occur, charcoal abundances were far lower than in the last 10,000 years. Even fire-prone settings tell the same story. Lakes on the rainforest-savanna ecotone in Bolivia show very low and infrequent fire during the glacial period, high Andean lake sediments contain only minuscule pre-human charcoal, and a sediment core from 2,700 meters on the eastern Andean slopes of Ecuador recorded an absence of fire for 30,000 years until human activity began around 4,500 calibrated years before present.

To build the new reconstruction, the researchers compiled 1,361 accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dates from 303 sites, discarding 32 modern post-1950 dates and analyzing the remaining 1,329 individually calibrated ages, which span the last 12,000 years. The dataset combined 815 dates from archaeological sites where the dated material was explicitly described as charcoal or charred, and 546 dates from charcoal fragments retrieved from soil cores, including 31 new fragments the team submitted from eight soil sites across three regions of northwestern and southwestern Amazonia. Each date was calibrated with the IntCal20 or SHCal20 curve, and the team used summed probability distributions alongside composite kernel density estimations, repeated 1,000 times on random draws of the data, to guard against overinterpreting noise and calibration-curve artifacts.

The results reveal a clear geographic trajectory for fire in the basin. The earliest fires cluster in peripheral areas and along the main Amazon River channel, mirroring the earliest archaeological sites in the region. Fire activity increased across most regions between roughly 6,000 and 4,000 years ago, a period that also saw a rise in dated occupation sites across South America and coincides with the earliest documented maize cultivation in northwestern and southwestern Amazonia. From there, human-ignited fire spread geographically, and by about 2,000 years ago it appears across all regions and deep into the interior of the forests, a timing consistent with many Amazonian societies transitioning to sedentary lifestyles reliant on cultivation and plant domestication.

Not every region followed the same script. Random mark permutation tests, which compared each region’s summed probability distribution against the basin-wide pattern 1,000 times, showed that central Amazonia lagged behind the rest of the basin, with significantly lower fire activity for most of the period from 7,000 to 2,000 years ago and only exceeding other regions in the last 1,500 years. Northwestern Amazonia showed higher activity than other regions around 4,000 to 2,000 years ago but lower activity during the last 800 years. The southwestern and central regions were even antiphased between about 1,500 and 500 years ago, with one rising as the other fell, underscoring that fire histories were not regionally synchronous.

The most striking pattern, however, emerges in the last millennium. Overall fire frequency peaked between 1,300 and 500 calibrated years before present, corresponding to roughly A.D. 700 to 1450, and then declined in a two-phase pattern. The first decline began around 700 to 500 years before present, several centuries before Europeans first traveled down the Amazon River in A.D. 1541, and appeared in every region of the basin, though not synchronously. A second wave of decline in the frequency and density of dated material followed after European arrival. The authors argue that these two waves support two distinct demographic hypotheses: an ‘early abandonment’ or major land-use change preceding contact, and the ‘Great Dying’ — the catastrophic collapse of Indigenous populations estimated at 90 to 95 percent through enslavement, disease, and warfare following colonization.

The pre-contact decline is particularly significant because it has been contested. An estimated 5 to 20 million Indigenous people lived in Amazonia before European arrival, and the Great Dying has been hypothesized to have driven large-scale site abandonment and even a measurable dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide as forests regrew and sequestered carbon. Yet a previous synthesis of lake sediment records found no signal of widespread abandonment and reforestation at the moment of European contact; instead, it documented larger changes in fire and vegetation several hundred years earlier. The new soil and archaeological dataset, with its much broader spatial coverage than lake records alone, independently confirms that the earlier signal is real, while the larger sample size now also reveals the subsequent post-contact decline. The reason for the initial pre-European abandonment or land-use change remains unknown.

Why does fire matter so much in this forest? Because Amazonian plants evolved for millions of years in landscapes where fire was essentially absent, most species lack any adaptation to survive burning. A single fire can trigger significant species turnover, and repeated burns can produce complete turnover, favoring the few lineages with some fire tolerance, such as certain palms. A recent synthesis of Holocene charcoal and pollen from lake sediments showed that vegetation responses to human activities were slow and gradual until the last 2,000 years, then accelerated sharply. The new radiocarbon synthesis captures that same acceleration, showing fire spreading across all regions during the final two millennia of the pre-Columbian era.

The scale of that transformation leads the authors to a provocative conclusion: the restructuring of Amazonian pyrogeography over the last 2,000 years has likely induced rates and magnitudes of vegetation change comparable to, or exceeding, major climatic events such as deglaciation or ecological upheavals like the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna. Because the pool of species able to return after fire remained biogeographically and evolutionarily Amazonian and essentially fire-sensitive, the overall impact on plant assemblages has been subtle — shifting the balance toward species that were already present but tolerated fire best — yet the fingerprint of millennia of human fire management is now understood to be embedded in the structure of the forests standing today.

The study also demonstrates the power of newly curated databases. The Neotoma Database houses paleoecological data from lake sediments, the Latin American Pollen Database catalogs published records, and the recently launched AmazonArch database documents more than 6,000 archaeological sites with locations and radiocarbon dates. By integrating these compilations with new soil-charcoal dates, the researchers show that the modern Amazon is not a pristine wilderness untouched by fire, but a landscape whose fire regime — and therefore whose forest composition — was shaped by Indigenous societies for millennia, then reshaped again by their demographic collapse. As modern fires increasingly penetrate standing rainforest, understanding this deep history of human-fire interaction becomes essential context for conserving what remains.

Subject of Research: Holocene fire history and human-driven pyrogeography of the Amazon basin reconstructed from radiocarbon-dated charcoal and archaeological material

Article Title: The pyrogeography of Amazonia: a Holocene perspective

Article References: McMichael, C. N. H., Heijink, B. M., Witteveen, N. H., Zwarts, A., & Bush, M. B. (2026). The pyrogeography of Amazonia: a Holocene perspective. Frontiers of Biogeography, 19, Article e169863. https://doi.org/10.21425/fob.19.169863

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.21425/fob.19.169863

Keywords: Amazonia, pyrogeography, radiocarbon dating, charcoal, Holocene, Indigenous populations, Great Dying, early abandonment, paleoecology, fire history, archaeology, rainforest

The site itself is steeped in history. Gressly, the scientist who coined the very term facies, discovered bones of a large reptile that Rütimeyer soon named Gresslyosaurus. Karl Strübin opened six trenches at the locality in 1901, and in 1972 local geologist Hans Peter Mohler rescued further bones from a construction pit, most likely belonging to an early sauropodomorph dinosaur. Despite this rich legacy of discovery, interpretations of the bone bed’s origin remained contradictory. Some researchers argued for a storm-reworked shallow-marine setting, while others saw a lagoonal or terrestrial deposit. The new study set out to settle the question once and for all.

The bone bed itself sits within the Belchen Member, the uppermost part of the Klettgau Formation, resting on a sharp erosive surface. It is a discontinuous conglomeratic layer ranging from zero to five centimeters in thickness and extending laterally for just 1.8 meters. Its composition is extraordinary: coprolites, or fossilized droppings, dominate, together with vertebrate bones and teeth, reworked limestone clasts and large laminated sandstone pebbles. Below it lies a channel deposit of reworked caliche containing temnospondyl remains, and above it a cross-bedded sandy layer with uni-directional wave ripples, marine bivalves and resting traces of starfish. The whole succession documents a transgression, the slow drowning of a coastal landscape by an encroaching sea.

The vertebrate assemblage is remarkably diverse. Quantitative analysis of a 7.7 cubic decimeter sample shows that bony fish make up about 49 percent of the remains and sharks and their relatives about 43 percent. The predatory ray-finned fish Sargodon tomicus is the most frequent single taxon, followed by scales of Gyrolepis albertii and the sharp teeth of Severnichthys acuminatus, a hunter that grew up to a meter long. The small shark Lissodus minimus, a resident of lacustrine to brackish waters, dominates among the chondrichthyans, with the euryhaline hybodontids Hybodus cloacinus and Rhomphaiodon minor appearing more rarely. Tetrapods account for about 2.5 percent, including teeth of the giant temnospondyl amphibian Mastodonsaurus, an apex predator reaching five to six meters, and abundant remains of semi-aquatic phytosaurs.

Coprolites are the true stars of the deposit. They range from half a centimeter to ten centimeters across, and many show spiral structures that betray their producers. Some contain fish scales and small bones, while others include charcoal, linking their makers directly to the fire-swept land nearby. Jelly roll-like spiral specimens are attributed to sharks, and ribbed, arcuate forms match the ichnotaxon Alococopros, thought to derive from proterosuchid or prolacertid reptiles. The many different states of abrasion among the coprolites and bones, from pristine to heavily rounded, tell a story of repeated reworking: fossils that formed in a soil during a dry phase were eroded and concentrated during short-lived high-energy events as conditions grew wetter.

The pebbles embedded in the bone bed provided the decisive geochemical clues. Two types occur, arenitic and micritic, and both carry dark rims just below their surfaces composed of pyrite, an iron sulfide. Pyrite forms during early diagenesis in sulfate-rich waters, and because river water is normally poor in sulfate, the rims point to at least polyhaline, and possibly fully marine, salinity at the time of final deposition. Several micritic pebbles are also riddled with U-shaped borings matching the ichnogenus Rogerella, produced by acrothoracican barnacles known from marine to brackish settings. Stable isotope data reinforce the picture: most oxygen isotope values sit slightly below Late Triassic seawater values, indicating modest freshwater influence, while one pebble with values around minus seven per mil appears to be a caliche nodule eroded from land, perfectly consistent with the terrestrial plant and animal remains in the same layer.

Palynology pinned down the age and the landscape. Samples from the Strübin excavation yielded 32 and 36 sporomorph taxa respectively, including spores of bryophytes, lycophytes, sphenophytes and fifteen fern taxa, alongside a rich pollen flora of seed ferns, cycads, bennettitales and conifers. Crucially, both samples contain the diagnostic Rhaetian dinoflagellate cysts Rhaetogonyaulax rhaetica and Dapcodinium priscum, and marker taxa such as Rhaetipollis germanicus, Limbosporites lundbladii and Cingulizonates rhaeticus constrain the deposit to the middle Rhaetian, corresponding to the Limbosporites lundbladii Subzone of European biostratigraphic schemes. The abundance of hygrophilous spores reveals a lush, humid lowland vegetation, at odds with conventional reconstructions of a hot and arid Rhaetian climate and suggesting either a humid pulse linked to sea-level rise or a broader humid phase in the Central European Basin.

Among the most striking discoveries are charcoal fragments, the first Rhaetian charcoal ever recorded from Switzerland and the Alps. Microscopic anatomy shows pycnoxylic gymnosperm wood with uniseriate bordered pits, direct evidence of palaeo-wildfires. The strongly rounded edges of the larger fragments indicate long transport, probably as bed load in rivers draining forested hinterlands, before the charcoal was washed into the coastal plain. Wildfires are most frequent in climates with pronounced dry seasons, hinting at rainfall seasonality within an otherwise humid setting, and the permineralized conifer stem in the same beds corroborates the palynological evidence for rich conifer forests in the region.

Taken together, the evidence paints a vivid picture of a drowned world. Late Triassic Switzerland lay at the southern margin of the Central European Epicontinental Basin, receiving sediment from the Vindelician-Bohemian High and the Central Massif. The Niederschönthal succession begins with alluvial-plain clays, passes through a fluvial channel deposit and overbank sediments bearing the sauropodomorph Gresslyosaurus, then reaches the bone bed itself, an allochthonous mixture of freshwater, brackish and rare marine elements concentrated by transgressive pulses in channels cutting across a muddy coastal plain. Above it, marine bivalves and starfish traces announce full marine conditions, a trend that culminates in the ammonite-rich Lower Jurassic limestones higher in the cliff. The study demonstrates that such bone beds are not simple archives of one environment but complex palimpsests, where terrestrial, freshwater and marine influences interleave, offering a uniquely detailed window into the ecosystems that flourished just before the dawn of the dinosaurs’ dominance.

Subject of Research: Sedimentology and palaeoecology of a Rhaetian bone bed in northern Switzerland

Article Title: Sedimentology and palaeoecology of a Rhaetian bone bed in Northern Switzerland formed during transgression of a muddy coastal plain setting with fluvial-estuarine channels

Article References: Meyer, C. A., Wetzel, A., Roghi, G., & Kustatscher, E. (2026). Sedimentology and palaeoecology of a Rhaetian bone bed in Northern Switzerland formed during transgression of a muddy coastal plain setting with fluvial-estuarine channels. Swiss Journal of Geosciences, 119, 85-110. https://doi.org/10.3897/sjg.119.187486

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/sjg.119.187486

Keywords: bone bed, Rhaetian, Late Triassic, northern Switzerland, coastal plain, transgression, phytosaurs, coprolites, palynology, pyrite, charcoal, palaeoecology

The story begins with a sediment core recovered from the Amundsen Sea during an expedition of the research icebreaker Polarstern. In 2020, the same international team, led by marine geologist Dr Johann Klages of the Alfred Wegener Institute, stunned the scientific community when they announced in the journal Nature that the core contained an extraordinarily well-preserved forest soil dating back roughly 90 million years, complete with abundant pollen, spores and a dense network of fossil roots. During the Cretaceous, tectonic conditions placed this temperate rainforest even farther south than the drill site itself, a mere 900 kilometres from the geographic South Pole. Today, average annual temperatures at that location hover around minus 30 degrees Celsius, and the entire region lies beneath an ice sheet several kilometres thick.

The climate that supported such a forest was shaped by greenhouse conditions unlike anything in the recent geological past. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the warmest interval of the Cretaceous were four to six times higher than preindustrial modern levels, and the average annual temperature in the West Antarctic rainforest reached around 12 degrees Celsius, roughly two degrees warmer than present-day Germany. Rainfall was plentiful but strongly seasonal: dry periods regularly gave way to monsoon-like rainy seasons. For about four months of each year, the forest endured the continuous darkness of the polar night, yet conifers and tree ferns thrived, and dinosaurs roamed through the misty swamplands. It was this combination of warmth, abundant moisture and pronounced seasonality that set the stage for the fires the team has now documented.

In the new study, the researchers re-examined the same core using a broader suite of analytical methods, and the evidence of fire proved unmistakable. Throughout the Late Cretaceous section of the sediment sequence, the team identified microscopic charcoal particles, the diagnostic residue of vegetation burned in situ or transported short distances by water and wind. Critically, the abundance of these charcoal particles increased steadily in the younger sediments, indicating that fires became more frequent as the ecosystem evolved. The particles themselves carried chemical and structural signatures showing that the fuel was mainly soft conifer wood burned at relatively low temperatures, a pattern typical of surface fires that creep through undergrowth and ground litter without climbing into the forest canopy.

Fire left its mark in more than charcoal. The sediments also yielded amber, the fossilised form of tree resin, appearing in a configuration that suggests the resin flowed over fire-damaged areas of tree trunks and hardened into a protective seal, much as living conifers today exude resin to wall off wounds. Together, the charcoal and amber record a forest that was burned and healed, burned and healed again, over an extended stretch of Late Cretaceous time. Because volcanically active areas lay at least 400 kilometres away from the site during that period, the researchers conclude that the most plausible ignition source was not lava or volcanic ash flows but lightning strikes from thunderstorms, a conclusion consistent with the strongly seasonal, storm-prone climate inferred from the broader sedimentological and palaeontological evidence.

Perhaps the most consequential discovery in the core concerns what grew back after the fires. The sediments contain countless spores of peat moss of the genus Sphagnum, the same group of plants that dominates raised bogs across the modern Northern Hemisphere. These spores provide evidence of some of the earliest raised bogs known, and their rise was closely intertwined with the recurrence of fire. According to the scenario the researchers developed from their data, the temperate and very swampy Antarctic rainforest, with its alternating dry and monsoon seasons, gradually silted up and transitioned into a peatland dominated by peat mosses. Wildfires, growing ever more frequent, played a decisive role in that transition by keeping the vegetation open, preventing the re-establishment of dense forest, and creating the conditions under which waterlogged, moss-dominated ground could persist and expand.

Once the peat bog had formed, fire did not disappear from the system. Instead, it changed character. Ground-level smouldering fires occurred repeatedly within the peat itself, burning slowly through damp, carbon-rich material rather than racing through standing forest. Co-first author Prof. Dr Ulrich Salzmann of Northumbria University draws a direct line from that ancient process to the present day, noting that such smouldering ground fires resemble those that have become increasingly common in German peatlands in recent years, where prolonged drought has lowered water tables and left once-saturated peat vulnerable to slow, persistent combustion. The Antarctic core thus preserves a complete natural experiment in how fire, hydrology and vegetation interact during the birth and maturation of a peatland, conducted under greenhouse conditions far warmer than today’s.

The climate significance of that experiment is difficult to overstate. Peatlands are among the most effective long-term carbon stores on Earth, accumulating partially decomposed plant material over thousands to millions of years because waterlogged conditions slow decay to a crawl. Co-first author Prof. Dr Thorsten Bauersachs of RWTH Aachen University emphasises that peatlands played a key role in the climate system then as now, precisely because of this capacity to lock away carbon over long periods. Paradoxically, the Cretaceous record suggests that in a warm climate, where wetlands dry out more quickly and fires that suppress forest development occur more frequently, conditions can actually favour the formation of new peatlands, allowing carbon-rich plant matter to accumulate even as the world warms. Fire, in other words, was not merely a destructive force in this ancient ecosystem but an architect of one of the planet’s most durable carbon sinks.

For the research team, the parallels between the Cretaceous Antarctic and today’s high latitudes were among the most surprising findings of the study. Dr Johann Klages, co-first author of the paper, describes the team’s astonishment at finding evidence in the core of an early Antarctic ecosystem that, in many respects, resembled today’s Arctic raised bogs and also experienced regular fires. Modern raised bogs in Arctic and boreal regions face acute threats from climate change and increasing drought, and the fate of the carbon they store is a major uncertainty in projections of future warming. The West Antarctic record demonstrates that peat formation and fire can coexist and even reinforce one another under greenhouse conditions, but it also shows how sensitive these systems are to the balance between moisture and burning, a balance that human-driven warming is now shifting across the northern peatlands.

The study also underscores how much remains hidden beneath the Antarctic ice. A single sediment core, drilled through the seafloor of the Amengen Sea region, has now yielded a rainforest soil, a fire history and the trace of the earliest polar peatlands, all from a time when the South Pole itself was green. As analytical methods grow more sensitive, existing cores continue to surrender new secrets, and each one refines the picture of how Earth’s most extreme greenhouse intervals functioned. Ninety million years ago, lightning-lit fires crackled through swampy conifer forests under a polar night, and from those ashes rose the bogs that would bury carbon for geological time. Understanding that ancient dance between flame and moss may prove essential to anticipating what a warming world will do to the peatlands that still guard vast reservoirs of carbon today.

Subject of Research: Cretaceous wildfires and early Sphagnum peatland formation near the South Pole

Article Title: Evidence of ancient wildfires near the South Pole

Article References: Evidence of ancient wildfires near the South Pole. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Antarctica, wildfires, Cretaceous, peatlands, Sphagnum, paleoclimate, charcoal, amber, carbon storage, West Antarctica, sediment core, climate change