How did cold-blooded alligators and giant tortoises once thrive well above the Arctic Circle?
It turns out the climate in some Arctic locales sometimes never dipped below freezing some 50 million years ago, scientists now reveal. These new findings could foreshadow the impacts of continuing global warming on arctic plants and animals, researchers added. Scientists investigated Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic, which nowadays is one of the coldest, driest environments on Earth, where sparse vegetation and a few mammals eke out life amid tundra, permafrost and ice sheets. “We go up in July each year, which is usually the most pleasant month in the Arctic, but even on a really nice year like this year, we still lost a day to weather, with a helicopter stuck in the snow,” researcher Jaelyn Eberle, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told LiveScience. The scientists always have to keep a shotgun with them, she noted, to ward off polar bears. However, during the early Eocene period about 50 million years ago, Ellesmere Island was probably similar
