Cynthia Hill, age 11, of Louisville, Kentucky, for her question:

How can there possibly be coal in Antarctica?

Teams of IGY scientists gathered a lot of astounding new information about Antarctica. They studied the penguins and the fishes, the weather and its relation to global climate. They studied the ice sheets and the rocks below them. And they verified the fact that Antarctica has coal.

The south polar region is a place of eternal winter. Most of the vast land is under ice sheets a mile or more thick. A few slopes and peaks are stripped bare by bitter blizzards. Flocks of birds pay flying visits to the place. Certain penguins waddle cheerfully through the cruel hardships, gorging on the fish that teem in the chilly ocean. Bud surely this is no place for thriving greenery  and the basic ingredient of all coal making is plant life. Yet beds of coal have been found in Antarctica. There are many deposits in the east and many more in the bleak, barren center of the land mass.

Most of our coal forest thrived in moist marches, some 200 million years ago when the climate was mild and balmy. Their spreading ferns, dense mosses and giant horsetails could not survive even for hours in Antarctica. During the south polar summer, lardy lichens cling to some of the coastal hillsides. There are scanty grasses and a few small flowering plants. But there is not enough vegetation to form coal.

However, teams of IGY scientists did some digging into the surface rocks of the frozen region. They found pollen grains frozen beneath the ice, fossilized seeds and plants that no. longer grow on the frozen surface. Antarctica, it seems, was not always a frozen world. In the dim past, the region enjoyed a milder climate. Deep cores taken from the rocks reveal a story of fossil plant life dating back some 300 million years. When our coal forests were flourishing, there were coal making plants in Antarctica.

Through countless ages, similar plants grew in South Africa and South America, India and Antarctica. The global climate was mild and ancient plant life formed coal beds in many lands, including the south polar region. Then the global climate began to change. Glaciers gradually grew on parts of Antarctica. The massive monsters began to move forward about 200 million years ago, tearing away the soil and crushing all plant life in their paths. In sheltered areas, coal forming plants survived another 100 million years.

Then they, too, were destroyed coal in Antarctica

 The old plant life of Antarctica was wiped out. But the masses of old vegetation did not vanish from the earth. Buried under rock slides and countless tons of glacial ice, it carbonized. The crushing pressure squeezed out the lighter chemicals until the remaining materials were mostly carbons. The black layers of carbonized plant life are the coal beds of the frozen south polar regions.

Earth scientists are not certain why the climate of Antarctica has changed so drastically through the ages. But they can suggest theories. We now know that the earth's poles wander around the globe, taking their polar climates with them. Millions of years ago, the south pole was out in the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles from its present position. At that time Antarctica was mild. Another theory suggests that the land mass itself may have drifted from a milder region of the globe. Most likely these and perhaps other factors helped to change Antarctica into a frozen world.