In February 2012, after twenty years of nearly uninterrupted work, a Russian drill broke through the last stretch of ice over East Antarctica and reached something no human had ever touched: the surface of a lake sealed shut long before our species existed. Water surged up the borehole, mixed with the kerosene and Freon used […]

A team of paleontologists has discovered on King George Island, in the South Shetland Islands, the first fossil footprint unequivocally attributable to a terrestrial mammal in the Eocene of Antarctica. It is a specimen barely two centimeters long, preserved as a natural mold in fine-grained volcanic sediment, providing direct evidence of the presence of a […]