45 million years, actually. A million years ago, the climate was already cold enough to produce ice sheets.
Yes, the climate was warmer, but that seems to have been partly because the site was not as far north as it is now.
Yes, that, and the layer of sediment on top. Here is a link to a news story about what happens when people bulldoze their way in without paying attention to what other people discovered before them (no, I'm not talking about you, David); note that the vandals in the story think that the fossil forest might help make global warming seem like a good thing (a suspect motivation), that they promise to put everything back the way it was (an impossible dream), and that they think that they can equate the past environment of the site to the future environment after global warming (an idea that doesn't take any account of the fact that the past environment of the site depended on different continental positions, different ocean current patterns, etc., etc., that will not be re-created by global warming, all of which info would have been available to any reasonably competent and honest researcher without a hidden agenda or a personal prejudice):
http://www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut990730/
nvt90723_01.html
Glad that a certain berserker hasn't found a way to convince American coal companies to fund her research, Daryl Krupa
