Word: forests
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...massive logs, gnarled stumps and matted leaves lying half buried on the rock-strewn hillside make it clear that a thick forest once stood there, trees that grew 150 ft. high and lived 1,000 years. "You can read the rings -- they look modern, like a lush forest area logged fairly recently," says Paleobotanist James Basinger of the University of Saskatchewan. "But then ) you look around, and you're in a desert. The only trees are dwarf willows one and two inches high." The sparse growth surrounding the half square mile of fallen trees is not surprising: the location...
Despite their great age, the stumps, logs and leaves are astonishingly well preserved. "This fossil forest is not petrified, turned to stone by minerals entering and replacing the wood cell structure," says Neil McMillan, of the Geological Survey of Canada, who discovered a similar but much smaller site 30 years ago on nearby Ellesmere Island. Instead, shallow burial in the Arctic soil has left the forest in a mummified state. As a result, says Basinger, "you can saw the wood. You can burn it." Indeed, during an expedition to the site in July, he actually brewed...
...fossil forest should also fuel some important scientific research. "You can see a prehistoric forest in a growth condition: how dense it was, how the trees grew, how productive it was," Basinger says. "It gives us a much better idea of the plants populating the high latitudes (at that time), the kind of environment there, and how they relate to living forms today...
First to spot the fossil forest was Paul Tudge, a helicopter pilot who has been ferrying Geological Survey scientists to and from remote sites on Axel Heiberg and Ellesmere for years. He had once seen McMillan's fossil forest, and on a flight to Axel Heiberg in July 1985, Tudge recalls, "I saw the same sort of stumps, but many, many of them." He later returned to the site, landed nearby, collected samples and brought them to Basinger, who immediately began planning this summer's expedition. Aided by a grant from the Geological Survey and accompanied by another fossil-forest...
Basinger found that the forest was indeed dense: the stumps are only about ten paces apart, and some are as much as six feet across. "Along the edge of the hill and up on the crest," he says, "are dozens, maybe hundreds of stumps." Basinger also made "an incredible find" -- up to 19 distinct layers of stumps. "Each layer is a forest that developed, lived for many centuries and was overtaken by floods of sediments that killed the roots," he says. "They must have been killed off relatively quickly for the roots not to decay, and buried deeply enough...