Riddle me this Batman… Axel Heilberg Island in Canada is well above the Arctic Circle at 79o N, uninhabited, and pretty much barren of everything. Everything that is except 45 million year old fossilized redwood trees known as “metasequoias”. The catch is that 45 million years ago when these big trees were alive, Axel Heilberg was still as close to the North Pole as it is today – therefore the metasequoia forest was in darkness for four months out of the year and subject to the sort of conditions completely opposed to what a prehistoric sequoia tree likes. However they figure this out out, the answer is going to be a doozy.
Jahren and co-author Sternberg chemically compared the fossil isotope levels with those found in water in contemporary precipitation patterns over great distances of forested lands in the Amazon. They were able to show that water traveling from near the equator almost due north across the continents to the vicinity of Axel Heilberg would have oxygen and hydrogen isotope signatures that matched those found in the fossils.
While it might seem mind-boggling to have the equator watering the north pole, Jahren notes that other major climatological differences at the time included the lack of a north polar ice cap.
[via 2012]