Australian
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Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Dr Paul Willis, palaeontologist and reporter from the weekly Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) television science documentary Catalyst. He retraces part of the 1902 journey of Swedish geographer and geologist Otto Nordenskjöld to Seymour Island near the Antarctic Peninsula. Standing on the deck of a ship, Willis tells of Nordenskjöld’s initial lack of success in finding fossils on the island, which ultimately turned out to be a fossil treasure-trove. Willis then lands on the island itself, where he, like Nordenskjöld, finds fossilised southern beech tree leaves dating from more than 55 million years ago. Willis explains how these fossils are similar to the leaves of trees found today in Australia and South America, proving that these continents were once joined through Antarctica.

Educational value points

• The clip depicts Seymour Island, also known as Seymour-Marambio Island, which at S 64 degrees 14 min, W 56 degrees 43 min forms part of the James Ross archipelago. Seymour Island is situated 60 km to the east of the northern extreme of the Antarctic Peninsula and is a significant part of Argentine Antarctica. The island is one of the few seasonally ice-free places on the Antarctic Peninsula and, as shown in this clip, its rock beds and the abundant fossils they contain are in plain view.

• Paul Willis’s expedition was inspired by Swedish explorer Otto Nordenskjöld’s expedition to Seymour Island. Nordenskjöld (1869-1928) sailed from Sweden on the Atlantic in October 1901 and in February 1902 he and five crew members landed on Snow Hill Island (next to Seymour Island). Nordenskjöld and his team were forced to spend a second winter there when the Atlantic sank on its return voyage. Atlantic’s crew survived the winter in two separate locations and incredibly the whole party was reunited on the same day an Argentinean rescue ship arrived in November 1903.

• Known as 'the Rosetta Stone of palaeontology’, Seymour Island is one of the most significant fossil sites on Earth. Not only does the island have fossilised southern beech leaves, the discovery of which contributed to the theories of continental drift and plate tectonics, but it also has an exposed fossil record, 7 or 8 km long, of the KT (Cretaceous-Palaeogene) boundary. This boundary indicates the time, 65 million years ago, when the Earth suffered a major impact and the commencement of the last of the great extinctions.

• The clip shows that leaves from one of the 35 modern species of southern beech (Nothofagus) are remarkably similar to fossilised leaves more than 55 million years old. The fossilised leaves are from an ancestral species of the same genus, and were discovered by Nordenskjöld on Seymour Island in December 1902. The similarity indicates that this part of Antarctica was covered by temperate deciduous forest and that the climate was once quite different.

• When Nordenskjöld compared his discovery to the modern distribution of southern beeches in Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea and New Caledonia, it suggested the possibility that these countries were once joined with Antarctica in a supercontinent. Once it became known that Nothofagus seeds cannot survive immersion in sea water and are not spread by migratory birds, no other explanation was possible and the supercontinent was given the name Gondwana.

• The blurring in the middle of some of the frames in the first half of the clip is the result of the camera lens freezing. The text on screen indicates that it was -6 degrees Celsius as some of the footage was being shot at 4.30 am. Average temperatures on Seymour Island are minus 1 degree Celsius during summer, and minus 21 degrees Celsius during winter, though strong winds can lower the apparent temperature to minus 60 degrees Celsius.

• The clip demonstrates high production values as the documentary was filmed entirely on location, with the narrator physically present, in one of the world’s most remote and inhospitable environments. As the budget for Catalyst did not stretch to chartering a ship to go to Seymour Island, Willis negotiated a role for himself as the scientific tour guide on board an adventure tourism cruise to Antarctica.