Located within the Arctic Circle north of mainland Canada, a full 8/9ths of the way from the equator to the North Pole, the uninhabited Canadian island is far enough north to make Iceland look like a great spot for a winter getaway, and today there’s not much to it beyond miles of rocks, ice, a few mosses, and many fossils.

The fossils tell of a different era, though, an odd time about 45 million years ago when Axel Heilberg, still as close to the North Pole as it is now, was covered in a forest of redwood-like trees known as metasequoias.

Hope Jahren, an assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University, recently published results that partially demystified Axel Heilberg’s vanished forests. Jahren and colleague Leo Sternberg of the University of Miami uncovered evidence that the Axel Heilberg’s forests probably received equatorial water and warmth from a prehistoric weather pattern unlike anything in existence today.