WEBVTT 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:14.000 We are camping in the Allan Hills, which is about 90 miles north of McMurdo Station 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:17.000 in the Transantarctic Mountains. 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:20.000 What we are doing here in Antarctica is studying fossil plants 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:24.000 and fossil forests in the early Jurassic about 180 million years ago. 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:26.000 We have been camping here for about a week, 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:31.000 and the purpose of this camp is that we have helicopters land here and pick us up 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:35.000 and we go and work at different localities to find plant fossils. 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:39.000 We also work locally on foot looking at plant fossils in the surrounding stratigraphy. 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:43.000 This comes from Carapace Nunatak, and it is Jurassic in age. 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:48.000 The whole set up of Carapace is basically a lot of basalt flows 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:53.000 coming into, like, lake sediments and other environments 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:58.000 Most of it is in the mountain itself, but over time, a lot of this erodes out. 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:01.000 This material we actually found on the moraine, 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:03.000 so you could just walk around and pick up the material on the moraine, 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:07.000 which makes it a lot safer for us and easier to collect material. 00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:12.000 Here's a nice specimen here, and you can see various lines in here, 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:17.000 some are distorted. But all the plant material occurs in these dark lines. 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:20.000 We have in the last week actually increased the known diversity 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:23.000 of plant fossils on Antarctica in the Triassic. 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:26.000 We have uncovered some brand new fossils we don't really know much about. 00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:31.000 They are brand new to Antarctica. We have also discovered a tremendous amount of diversity 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:33.000 of plant life in the Triassic just for this locality alone. 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:37.000 So this is a very important find here...some leaf fossils there, 00:01:37.000 --> 00:01:46.000 some Dicroidium here, I see a Ginkgo leaf there, so if you continue to break these layers open 00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:50.000 you might find more complete preservation of those leaves 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:57.000 and what we are seeing are just a little fragment of the leaves on the exteriors of these bedding plains here. 00:01:57.000 --> 00:02:02.000 This is a piece of Triassic wood, and this one is really rare because you have the stem that is connected to the root; 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:03.000 and that is pretty amazing. 00:02:03.000 --> 00:02:08.000 This is from a fossil forest that was just found yesterday actually, so it was really great. 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:15.000 To actually find a forest, which is in situ, which means that's where it was originally when it died, is extraordinarily rare. 00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:20.000 This is one of about 37 of these in situ trees at this forest - really incredible. 00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:26.000 A lot of them are pretty rotten out and that is really great for looking at the ecology 00:02:26.000 --> 00:02:31.000 like what were they doing there, how did they die, how was the ecosystem back in the Mesozoic. 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:33.000 And so, a really great find. 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:36.000 We really don't have plants that exist at polar latitudes today. 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:38.000 If you continue the current trend of climate change, 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:44.000 we might see different ecosystems migrating in a northern hemisphere towards the North Pole. 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:50.000 But we don't understand exactly how that type of plant migration will occur, which plants will move northward, 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:55.000 and what will happen to the ecosystems at more southerly latitudes. 00:02:55.000 --> 00:02:58.000 And so, the importance of these fossils in Antarctica 00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:04.000 is that they preserve that record of that plant community change, that plant migration - 00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:08.000 and that all is basically crystalized in the fossil record. 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:11.000 Our job, of course, is trying to reconstruct the plants. 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:19.000 And as you can imagine, it is quite hard because this is pretty much like a salad or a compost heap. 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:21.000 We have to use different characters of the plant 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:25.000 to try to put the right plants together, the right parts. 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:27.000 A little bit of detective work. 00:03:27.000 --> 00:03:31.000 This is essentially a career. I mean you could spend your entire career, 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:33.000 like decades of work on this; for example, this piece. 00:03:33.000 --> 00:03:37.000 You can look at this and you can cut it up and you can describe it anatomically, morphologically. 00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:42.000 You can give it a new species name. I can look at the microbial component of this. 00:03:42.000 --> 00:03:48.000 You can give this to a geochemist, and they can look at the chemistry of it so what was present here. 00:03:48.000 --> 00:03:52.000 You can give it to a sedimentary geologist and they can say, 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:55.000 "This is how it was preserved; this is the type of landscape it was in." 00:03:55.000 --> 00:03:59.000 So there is an entire multitude of questions that can come from just a single piece. 00:03:59.000 --> 00:04:03.000 And that's the really incredible part of our job. You can answer just so many questions with this 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:05.000 and probably things that we haven't even thought of today. 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:09.000 It just keeps on building. It never ends, and that is great.