Apr 26 : The Arctic was not the ice-capped frigid landscape as we know it today, but was balmy, much like Florida, with animals resembling hippopotamuses and crocodiles sharing the terrain with other life forms, some 55 million years ago.

“The climate here about 55 million years ago was more like that of Florida. Where we are now was once a temperate rainforest,” New Scientist quoted Appy Sluijs, an expert in ancient ecology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, as saying.

He said fossil evidence of a pantodont, a plant-eating hippopotamus-like creature weighing about 400 kilograms found on an Arctic island, together with other evidence of sequoia-type trees and crocodile-like beasts in the Arctic millions of years ago, were adding to the growing evidence that the Arctic had a tropical climate.

The footprints were discovered at the end of a horizontal coalmine shaft on the barren Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, some 1000 kilometres from the North Pole. The find was five kilometres inside a mountain and 300 metres below the surface.

According to Sluijs, forests grew in the Arctic when carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, was at about 1000 parts per million in the atmosphere as a result of natural swings in the climate, perhaps linked to volcanic activity and a thaw of frozen methane.

Carbon dioxide levels are now at almost 390 per million in the atmosphere, up from 270 before the west’s Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, and rising fast. It could reach 1000 parts per million by 2100 if not held in check, said Sluijs.

“It’s a worrying scenario for future global warming, as greenhouse gases are now believed to be at their highest for at least 100,000 years. When Svalbard was hot, 55 million years ago, the islands were also closer to the North Pole. Sea levels were about 100 metres higher than now and Antarctica was free of ice. Many parts of the globe near the equator would have been too hot for modern plants and animals that have adapted to a modern climate, he added,” he said. (ANI)