The perfectly preserved wood was aged between 15 million and 30 million years old. Zoë Thomas/University of SouthamptonThomas/University of Southampton
Posted on 10/01/2024 8:16:40 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
No trees have grown on the windswept Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean for tens of thousands of years — just shrubs and other low-lying vegetation. That's why a recent arboreal discovery nearly 20 feet... beneath the ground caught researchers' attention...
Thomas and colleagues went to the site and began "picking up these big chunks of wood." The tree remains were so pristinely preserved they looked like driftwood, Thomas said. But knowing the history of the Falklands, the researchers knew the remnants couldn't be modern...
The presence of the tree fossils suggests the island was once home to a temperate rainforest — a dramatically different ecosystem from the islands' current environment, Thomas and her collaborators reported earlier this month in the journal Antarctic Science...
The tree remains proved too old for radiocarbon dating, which can determine the age of organic matter up to 50,000 years old. The international team of scientists turned to microscopic pollen and spores found in the peat for answers.
Fossilized pollen is indicative of a particular span of geologic time, so its presence can help determine the age of a fossil site, said Michael Donovan, paleobotany collections manager at Chicago's Field Museum. He wasn't involved in the study...
There, they also analyzed a variety of spores compacted and sealed in the same layers of peat as the wood. Pollen records led them to conclude the tree trunks and branches date to between 15 million and 30 million years old...
The specimens would have belonged to a rainforest similar to what's found in modern Patagonia, suggesting that the climate in the Falkland Islands millions of years ago must have been wetter and warmer than it is today.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
The perfectly preserved wood was aged between 15 million and 30 million years old. Zoë Thomas/University of SouthamptonThomas/University of Southampton
Well, this should be fun. Thanks for the link, ya bastid.
I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
And I noticed there wasn’t a chair
I sat on a rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
“It’s time for bed”
She told me she worked
In the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn’t
And crawled off to sleep in the bath
And when I awoke I was alone
This bird had flown
So I lit a fire
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
What CAN’T climate change do?
Maybe a flood took out all the trees, just sayin.
Has anyone looked at the map of Pangea? Antarctica was probably on the equator.
We had a nicely forested small island just offshore...Squaw Island, now renamed something-or-other...that had all of its trees killed by nesting seabirds.
In the 1970’s I was working as a medic at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope. One of the oil rig drillers told me about a forearm-sized piece of tree branch that came up in the drilling mud from 2000 feet down that had the impression of a vine wrapped tightly around it. That was from a while back. There are no trees above the Arctic Circle at this time although there is driftwood washed west from the Mackenzie River in Canada on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.
Wow! That wood is in incredible shape for its age. Heckuva find.
Avalanches due to melting ice have buried things deep.
In Antarctica there are fossils showing that it had a temperate climate about 3 and half million years ago. The glacial cap on Antarctica isn't 30 million years old, and none of it has to do with continental drift / plate tectonics.
Maybe, I wonder about the information since it’s CNN, probably got a few wires crossed, since she seemed to be focused on the gender of the excavator. If it were in permafrost it could survive a long time, but I’m skeptical that it isn’t fossilized. It is obviously basically intact and very old, however, see my above remark about Antarctica.
And then they didn’t grow back? Nah.
Oh, don’t get me wrong- there’s nothing in the article to suggest it isn’t fossilized. That would be most unlikely indeed!
But the detail still preserved, along with it splitting in the direction of the (former) grain, and the lack of any apparent compression on any axis makes it an absolutely beautiful fossil for its age.
In my experience, a lot of fossilized wood is plainly wood at a glance, but upon inspection suffers some compression along at least one axis / breaks across the former grain / shows distortion or even obliteration of fine detail. This find looks like the sort where they might be able to still discern fine structures under a microscope. The fact that they’re ID’ing fossilized pollen grains from the same material is also a good sign (although pollen grains hold up better than wood).
Very neat! Thanks for sharing.
My pleasure, and thanks for the kind replies.
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