Wildfires near the South Pole burned 90 million years ago

Found evidence in a sediment core in Antarctica that wildfires near the South Pole were a regular occurrence some 90 million years ago. The science-journalism coverage adds useful context, while the strongest evidential footing still comes from the underlying data, papers or institutional documentation.

This matters because Earth science becomes stronger when local observations can be placed inside a broader physical pattern that spans time and geography. The planet operates as a coupled system in which atmospheric, oceanic, cryospheric and solid-Earth processes interact across timescales from days to millions of years. A measurement that captures one variable at one location and one moment has limited interpretive value until it is embedded in the longer series and wider spatial coverage that allow natural variability to be separated from forced change. The post Wildfires near the South Pole burned 90 million years ago first appeared on EarthSky. And on September 7, 2026, researchers with the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, said wildfires happened here regularly.

The researchers published their peer-reviewed paper in the journal Communications Earth and Environment on September 7, 2026. The South Pole was once a rainforest Back in 2020, researchers with the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) said they found evidence that a rainforest once existed in what is now.

Co-author Johann Klages of AWI said: In a sediment core from the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, we found an extremely well-preserved forest soil dating back around 90 million. During the Cretaceous, tectonic conditions meant that this temperate rainforest lay even farther south, just 900 kilometers from the South Pole.

Today, average annual temperatures at this location are around -30 Celsius and everything is covered by an ice sheet several kilometers thick. Our discovery showed that during the warmest period of the Cretaceous, when atmospheric CO2 levels were four to six times higher than today, a relatively warm and humid climate.

The broader interest lies in linking the observation to climatic, geophysical or environmental dynamics that extend well beyond the immediate event or location. Earth science is unusual in that its most important questions operate on timescales that no single research career can observe directly, making the archival record, whether in ice, sediment, rock or satellite data, as important as any new measurement. Results that can be embedded in that record, and that either confirm or challenge the patterns it reveals, carry disproportionate scientific weight.

Their analysis showed the charcoal was mostly coming from soft conifer wood burning at low temperatures. Imagining Antarctica from the past So now imagine what Antarctica looked like 90 million years ago.

Because this item comes through EarthSky as science journalism, it should be treated as contextual reporting rather than primary evidence. Good science reporting can identify why a result matters, connect it to the wider literature and make technical work readable, but the decisive evidence remains in the original paper, dataset, mission release or technical record. That distinction is especially important when a story is later repeated by aggregators, because repetition increases visibility, not evidential strength.

The next step is to place the result inside longer time series and to compare it with independent instruments and independent sites. Earth system observations gain most of their interpretive power from network density and temporal depth, not from any single measurement however precise. Model simulations that assimilate the new data will help clarify whether the observation fits comfortably within known natural variability or represents a shift that existing models do not reproduce.

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