Answer:
Step-by-step explanation:
As these fossils suggest, Antarctica hasn’t always been as cold as it is now. Before Captain Scott and his team perished during their return journey from the South Pole in 1912, they had collected a number of important fossils from near the Beardmore Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains. When this collection was retrieved and analysed, it was found to contain fossils of an ancient ‘seed-fern’ tree (Glossopteris). Not only did this prove that the continent must have been much warmer in the past to support such vegetation, but the similarity with Glossopteris fossils found in South America, South Africa, and Australia gave strong support to the emerging idea, championed by Alfred Wegener, that the continents were once joined and have since moved apart – the theory of ‘continental drift’.During the 1960s, the mechanisms behind continental drift finally became understood and our modern theory of plate tectonics was born. As with other continents, sea floor spreadingin some places and subduction in others has caused Antarctica’s position to change over geological time; and hence Antarctica hasn’t always been located over the South Pole. Indeed in the distant geological past, the pattern and configuration of tectonic plates has been very different from today. For example, about 450 million years ago the crust that makes up England was in the Southern Hemisphere while crust making up Antarctica straddled the equator!Some 200 million years ago, Antarctic continental crust was joined with South American, African, Indian, and Australian continental crust making up a large southern land mass known as Gondwana (the southern part of the supercontinent called Pangea). After this time, Gondwana slowly split apart to create Antarctica as a separate continent, and Antarctica has gradually moved away from the other southern continents towards its present polar position.