The Transantarctic Mountains split our planet’s southernmost continent into east and west, at times rising more than 14,000 feet high. Today, it’s a barren landscape of inhospitable rock and ice. But for the scientists who hike and camp this rocky spine, it’s also a portal to another Earth.
Park University paleobotanist Patty Ryberg and her colleagues are uncovering the fossilized remains of a lush forest that thrived in the Antarctic Circle some 260 million years ago during the Permian period. One type of tree, called glossopterids, dominated much of a supercontinent. Then they vanished in a geological instant.
