Page 456 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

that latitude today. We can go to the tropics and find trees growing in a
warm environment, but we can’t find trees growing in a warm
environment with the light regime these trees had: 24 hours of light in
the summer and 24 hours of dark in the winter.” ’
3

Exhibit 2

Geologists have found no evidence of any glaciation having been present
anywhere on the Antarctic continent prior to the Eocene (about 60 million
years ago.) And if we go as far back as the Cambrian (c. 550 million
4
years ago) we find irrefutable evidence of a warm sea stretching nearly or
right across Antarctica, in the form of thick limestones rich in reef-
building Archaeocyathidae: ‘Millions of years later, when these marine
formations had appeared above the sea, warm climates brought forth a
luxuriant vegetation in Antarctica. Thus Sir Ernest Shackleton found coal
beds within 200 miles of the South Pole, and later, during the Byrd
expedition of 1935, geologists made a rich discovery of fossils on the
lofty sides of Mount Weaver, in latitude 86° 58’ S., about the same
distance from the Pole and about two miles above sea level. These
included leaf and stem impressions and fossilized wood. In 1952 Dr
Lyman H. Dougherty, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington,
completing a study of these fossils, identified two species of a tree fern
called Glossopteris, once common to the other southern continents
(Africa, South America, Australia) and a giant fern tree of another species
...’
5

3 Discover The World Of Science, February 1993, p. 17. The fifteen mineralized tree
stumps, presumably the remnant of a much larger forest, range from three and a half to
seven inches in diameter. They were saplings of a well-known genus of seed fern,
Glossopteris [found in much of the southern hemisphere’s coal]. Unlike true ferns, seed
ferns had seeds instead of spores, were often treelike, and are now extinct ... All around
the Mount Achernar tree stumps, Taylor’s colleagues found the tongue-shaped imprints
of fallen Glossopteris leaves.
Deciduous trees are an indicator of a warm climate, and so is the absence of ‘frost
rings’. When Taylor analysed the growth rings in samples from the stumps she found
none of the ice-swollen cells and gaps between cells that arise when the growth of a tree
is disrupted by frost. That means there wasn’t any frost in the Antarctic at that time.
‘In our memory Antarctica has always been cold,’ says Taylor. ‘It’s only by looking at
fossil floras that we can see what potential there is for plant communities. This fossil
forest, growing at 85 degrees latitude, gives us some idea of what is possible with
catastrophic climate change.’ N.B. The trees were killed by a flood or mudflow—another
impossibility in Antarctica today.
4 The Path of the Pole, p. 61.
5 Ibid., pp. 62-3.

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