Microorganisms are also dying out due to climate change. Scientists have tested this in Antarctica

For a long time, scientists assumed that microorganisms, due to their widespread distribution,

are much less affected by climate change, unlike plants and animals, which often haveBut this turned out not to be true.

In the early Miocene, about 20 million years ago, atThe Antarctic continent's climate varied from temperate to subpolar. The continent was largely covered by tundra vegetation and forests. This situation changed dramatically when the continent began to cool rapidly 14 million years ago, ice sheets expanded over Antarctica, and plants and animals became extinct on a massive scale.

Researchers analyzed diatomsalgae in sediments of Antarctic lakes aged 14-15 million years, which appeared there shortly before the beginning of the great Miocene cooling. Diatoms are one of the most diverse and ecologically important groups of algae in the world and can easily petrify due to their cell wall, which is made of amorphous glass.

To their surprise, the team found more than 200 species of diatoms in the sediments.For this reason, the researchers additionally analyzed lacustrine sediments at the genus level, that is, at the classification level above species.This analysis showed that the species composition of Miocene Antarctica was very different from that of theThe diatom flora characteristic of the modern continent has much fewer species.In contrast, the Miocene flora of diatoms shows similarities to the species-rich flora currently found in warmer regions of the southern hemisphere, such as South America, Australia, and New Zealand.

Based on these results, the researchersconcluded that the Miocene diatom flora in Antarctica was largely extinct due to severe climatic changes 14 million years ago.

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