16 December 2022

#AntarcticLog: Blasts from the past

Posted by Shane Hanlon

#AntarcticLog is a series of comics by Karen Romano Young. You can find the originals here.
 
Magical? Science? Sure, as samples offer clues to unseen, unknown worlds nothing like our own, the metaphors turn to ideas like time machines and portals, and the adjectives turn to fantasy.  And yet — it’s real!  Check this — new proof of ecosystems and species previously unknown, based on a few grains of dirt. 
 
 
The samples we rely on to see into the past this way are only available as people travel to the areas where such clues can be found.  In the case of the poles, those areas can be hard to reach, almost impossibly so. 
 
 
The cold killed the Scott party, but a fossil found in Antarctica relatively recently proves that the place wasn’t so forbidding in the distant past. 
 
 
Fossils from frogs to mammoths reveal the makeup of environments, and add branches to the family trees.  The mastodon DNA located in this week’s new comic proved the existence of an ancestor previously lost to history. 
 
 
Karen Romano Young is a writer, artist, deep-sea diver, and polar explorer. Follow her on Twitter & Instagram.