Gulf of Mexico's 60,000 year old underwater forest

June 26, 2017 11:14 AM

In an ice age, a couple ice ages ago, a forest of cypress trees was lost under the waves of the Gulf of Mexico. Amazingly, the wood is still intact, and can tell scientists about ancient forests, and how rising sea levels might affect modern forests. This short documentary will introduce you to the hurricane that allowed for the discovery, the process of diving for samples and studying them, and what we can learn from this amazing find.

Produced by This is Alabama. You can read more about the project on this news release.

posted by HakaiMagazine (10 comments total)

There's something weirdly romantic about an organic material like wood surviving for 60K years.

These sorts of flood plain burials interest me, if for no other reason than they provide good examples of how the impact of rising waters varies greatly across terrains. A few inches may not amount to much in one location, yet be totally devastating to flatter areas.

There's a great Time Team episode from 2007, Britain's Drowned World, that covers Doggerland during the last Ice Age (and thus much more recent than these trees). It's well worth a watch, but what really sparked my imagination was this little bit where Tony Robinson lays out just how rapid a 2 cm a year rise can translate to on flat land.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 12:04 PM on June 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

Great stuff. Running sap from 50,000 year-old trees. I wonder what insects are also preserved in the wood. Not fossilized, but actually preserved.
posted by jetsetsc at 12:10 PM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

and it's at 20 fathoms (60 feet down) -- that much water was held in ice ? Amazing.
posted by k5.user at 12:18 PM on June 26, 2017

There is more going on than the ice taking water away. There are three forces that affect the change in shorelines:

• Isostatic change - Sinking earth because of the weight of ice, on it
• Eustatic change - The amount of water added from melting ice
• The tectonic plates themselves move around

The institute I work for discovered an island where all these forces cancelled themselves out, so the coast line had not changed at all in 30k years. This is called a sea level hinge, and it's extremely rare.

Incidentally, due to this hinge, the institute discovered evidence of settlement on one island that predates the Clovis model. More on that later.
posted by HakaiMagazine at 12:36 PM on June 26, 2017 [27 favorites]

Ooh, I'd like to hear about that, Hakai! In the NA settlement debate, there's been a lot of discussion about how any coastal path sites were likely drowned, so one that wasn't is fascinating.
posted by tavella at 1:11 PM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

Thank you for a marvelous post that hits so many of my interests. I'll add this to my Pinterest board "Dendrochronology". Dendrochronology has fascinated me from the first time I heard the term and learned about it, thirty or more years ago. I've subscribed to the Hakai newsletter linked and am impatiently waiting for the article about the settlement that predated the Clovis model.

I've long held an opinion that the extinction of megafauna in the Americas may have been linked to the arrival of humans with associated increased fire frequency that led to major changes on vegetation which contributed to the megafaunal extinction. The Clovis model makes my hypothesis impossible. I've been hoping for evidence of earlier human occupancy in the Americas supported by sediment cores with pollen records and carbon from widespread wildfires which might indicate changes in vegetation, linking human activity other than hunting with the rapid extinction of mega fauna across North and South America.
posted by X4ster at 1:38 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is interesting, because just this weekend I was at the "Ghost Forest" in Neskowin, Oregon [1] [2]. I believe that some of the trees are in the water even at the lowest tide. Although there are other examples of this phenomenon, it isn't usual to find the remains of a forest beneath the tide. Normally a forest of Sitka spruce is only found growing many feet above the high tide line. How did these trees get there?

I found the internet to be rather bad at providing me an answer to this. Most web sites cite an earthquake as the cause. However, I know that the Pacific Plate is plowing under the North American Plate, pushing it up. Why did this patch of forest instead fall down to a level below the surf?

After much searching, I've found this sensible explanation

In subduction zones, two tectonic plates are slowly colliding together at about the same rate your fingernails grow, building stress. While the fault is locked in place, the stress builds by warping the upper plate, buckling it upwards. When the earthquake finally strikes, releasing the stress, the upper plate slams down and out, rapidly submerging the coast.

This page contains a nice illustration (see the image that says "Stuck area ruptures...").
posted by polecat at 2:10 PM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I kinda want to make something out of that wood.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:02 PM on June 26, 2017

It's probably not usable like those wood ships they pull up from the bottom and then have to take extra-ordinary measures to not have them disintegrate.
posted by Mitheral at 8:21 PM on June 27, 2017

Wow, this is fascinating stuff. Thanks for posting this.
posted by brundlefly at 2:48 AM on June 28, 2017