UNDER THE POLES

[Chlidonias]

I still have no idea what this thread is even about!

 

[Hix]

I still have no idea what this thread is even about!

AS I understand it (and I didn't at first either) Adrian1963 believes there to be prehistoric creatures trapped in the ice under the poles, trapped there for thousands or millions of years. He wants to know what species they might be.

And on another discussion in this thread, David Attenborough has just been to the North Pole (for the first time in his 83 years) to report on the receding ice in his new series "Frozen Planet".

Sir David Attenborough heads north to fulfil a childhood dream - Times Online



Hix

 

[adrian1963]

I'm not looking for prehistoric animals it's supposed to be about what animals maybe under the ice
What I mean is are there any extinct animals in the ice that have a possible impact on todays animal life forms, but the thread has been overtaken by the idea that we are not seeing a reduction in the size of the ice caps and gobal warming.
We all know that this a topic of today global warming that is, but the ice caps have been melting for many year before we even knew about global warming.
I still think there are many animals forms that have been captured in the ice that we know nothing about, like wise many of the rain forrests and other thickly dense forrests we don't know enough about these places as new species seem to be coming to the front on a regular basis these days

 

[Chlidonias]

With the earth warming up and the South and North poles decreasing in size I was just wondering if you had thought what animals of land or sea could be trapped inside the mass of ice that makes up both poles.

Anyway back to the thread Imyself believe there are many types of sea mammals held within the ice caps and if we could get to them then maybe we could actually find something out about our past

I still say we could learn alot from the sea life trapped inside the ice

I'm not looking for prehistoric animals it's supposed to be about what animals maybe under the ice
What I mean is are there any extinct animals in the ice that have a possible impact on todays animal life forms.........I still think there are many animals forms that have been captured in the ice that we know nothing about.......

you're going to have to help me out here adrian1963. I think I've understood the purpose behind the thread but it still doesn't make much sense. The part that is easy to understand is that you believe there to be animals preserved in deep-freeze fashion within the ice-caps and you are wondering what people think they might be. Less simple is that you want them to be "extinct animals" but not "prehistoric animals" (by the context of which I assume you mean dinosaurs), but then the implication at the end of the last quote above is that they should also be unknown species. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by these extinct species having had "a possible impact on todays animal life forms"

Regardless of what the specific meanings of the thread are, the polar ice-cap of the northern hemisphere is made up of floating pack-ice, averaging just two to three metres in thickness. There is very little likelihood of any large (vertebrate) animals being frozen within it for more than a few years due to waxing and waning of the ice with the seasons. Antarctica on the other hand is an actual ice-covered continent with relatively small areas of sea-ice ringing the shorelines. At the south pole the ice is estimated to be 2700 meters thick, and the average thickness of ice for the entire continent is about 1600 metres. There are fossils many millions of years old of terrestrial animals and plants contained within the rocks of the continent but the land has been under ice for so long that there would be none of the former terrestrial inhabitants preserved intact in "deep-freeze" as you would like to imagine. If you want to believe that there may be long-extinct marine mammals somehow preserved in the ice around the continent then that's fine by me, but the chance is extremely remote.