h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

According to local advertising, polar bears like to dress up as penguins and line-dance to the BeeGees.

Them polar bears is freaky.

Not to digress from the vitally important issue of dancing polar bears, but the life forms we've been talking about--penguins, whales, seals, sea elephants, krill, etc--all exist on the edges of Antarctica. What I would be interested in are those life forms formerly existing on the continent such as what the fossil record would show.

Antarctica was not always as far south as it is now, so the fossil record would show the same sort of stuff that you get in the other southern continents: S America, Africa, India and Australia. It's pretty certain there would have been large ostrich-like birds in Antarctica because S America, Australia and S Africa all have them. They evolved before those continents broke up.

The southern continents were once part of a super continent known as Gondwanaland.

A google search for "Antarctica fossil" brings up some interesting sites.

This is a reply to post 19 that said nature documentaries don't show nature to be red in tooth and claw - well the Blue Planet one did, the polar bear had an entirely red face after catching and eating a 1 ton beluga whale. I think this demonstrates 1) the savagery of nature, and 2) the disgusting table manners of the polar bear.

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I've heard tell that the actual land mass is considerably smaller than the ice covering. In other words, there's far less cake than icing.

...which means many South Pacific islands are in danger of disappearing under the waves because the US refuses to address global warming concerns...

And where the US goes Australia is sure to follow...

Oh and on the subject of Polar Bears and their 1 ton appetites - if regular bears s**t in the woods, where do Polar Bears s**t?

Let us just remember that we haven't shown it to be caused by human acticity. If we keep claiming it is, we will be in real trouble if it turns out to be wrong. Then science will have lost a lot of credibility. And it's not that I don't care about floodings, I live in Holland.

You don't think that the burning of billions of tons and millions of years worth of oil and coal reserves over a mere 100 years might not have just a teensy bit of an effect on the global environment?

Yes, I do believe it has a teensy effect. But volcanoes and sunspots have large effects.

This is certainly true, but the amount of CO2 produced by mankind is fairly small compared with the observed increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. Nobody yet knows where it is all coming from. If it is being caused by some natural process over which we have no control, we can forget Kyoto and start building dams.

Well, nobody says it will go on forever. The CO2 levels might stabilize in a few years.

...when the oil runs out?

To skip back (tra la la) to before the greenhouse bit, if you ever saw Walking with DInosaurs the BBC's nature programme about hand puppets being attacked by Steven Spielberg's pets in forests, then one of the episodes was set in Antarctica, detailing the problems dinosaurs had when it got a bit parky out. There used to be bucket loads of things running around there before someoen forgot to pay the gas bill and the heating got cut.

Strange how it all comes around? We are now paying the gas company (and the oil company) to heat us up by burning those bucket loads of things...

Just a couple of factoids:

There are hundreds of species of 'Penguins' and they roam the south coastal areas of S.Amer (anyone remember the landings on the Falkland Islands?) and parts of Africa and southern India. Must be some in Oz too surely!

The earth is warming. The last decade was the warmest ten years in the last 1000 years (ie: since Lief the Lucky found "Greenland" and "Vineland".)

The ice in the Artic Ocean is breaking up and the summer season is extending such that seasonal ice flows are thinner and flakier. Result: the Polar bears are staying on land more than ever. They are afraid to go after seals out on the weakened flows because they too often find themselves adrift on a shrinking and quickly disappearing flow, too far from land. And because of the competition for resources on land they are starving in record numbers.

So where did you get those heat stats from?