This is John Batcheler speaking to Thomas Halliday, the author of a book about everything alive on the planet Earth and where it came from.

Our predecessors, the forests, the creatures we know as reptiles, dinosaurs, the creatures

we know as mammals.

The book's title is Other Lands, A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds. Earth has been many kinds of worlds depending on

when you start the conversation. In this passage Thomas describes why it is

that Antarctica became ice covered and how that happened.

It starts what's important is the peninsula it stretches towards the southern tip of South America.

There are a series of islands there, one is called Seymour Island,

and at the time that they were connected, this peninsula touching Patagonia, the Antarctic region

was a temperate climate with forests and mammals, many mammals running around lots of birds.

But when the peninsula moved away from South America. It opened what we call the Drake Passage. Once that was

open, the circumpolar current took control and Antarctica's weather went completely cooler away

from the mix of the temperate climate from South America. The glaciers started. Hence, Antarctica today. This process took

tens of millions of years and if that peninsula ever closed Antarctica would go into reverse. However right now this is

Thomas Halliday describing the profound Drake Passage. More of this later.

Well, fortunately, it hasn't actually moved all that much in the intervening millions of years.

Seymour Island is today a small island off the West Antarctic Peninsula.

So it's the site of Antarctic research bases.

It's that the West Antarctic Peninsula is that spit of Antarctica which stretches up towards South America.

And at the time it was still part of this peninsula. And what was different, of course, is at that time it was a little bit closer to South America and the stretch of water that currently separates them which is today

known as the Drake Passage had only just opened up and that was something that was

going to have huge impacts on the environment of particularly Antarctica but the world as a whole.

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