Posted on 04/23/2007 8:11:31 PM PDT by A. Pole
Scientists exploring a mine have uncovered a natural Sistine chapel showing not religious paintings, but incredibly well preserved images of sprawling tree trunks and fallen leaves that once breathed life into an ancient rainforest.
Replete with a diverse mix of extinct plants, the 300-million-year-old fossilized forest is revealing clues about the ecology of Earths first rainforests . The discovery and details of the forest are published in the May issue of the journal Geology.
Were looking at one instance in time over a large area. Its literally a snapshot in time of a multiple square mile area, said study team member Scott Elrick of the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS).
Forest find
Over millions of years as sediments and plant material pile up, layer upon layer, the resulting bands become time indicators with the newest, youngest layer on the top and the oldest layer at the bottom. Typically geologists peel away a vertical slice of rocky material to look at material, including fossils, over a period of time.
A coal mine offers a unique view of the past. Instead of a time sequence, illuminated in the layer upon layer of sediments, the roof of an underground mine reveals a large area within one of those sediment layers, or time periods.
Miners in Illinois are used to seeing a few plant fossils strewn along a mines ceiling, but as they burrowed farther into this one, the sheer density and area covered by such fossils struck them as phenomenal, Elrick said.
Thats when they called paleobotanist Howard Falcon-Lang from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and William DiMichele, a curator of fossil plants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
"It was an amazing experience. We drove down the mine in an armored vehicle, until we were a hundred meters below the surface, Falcon-Lang said. The fossil forest was rooted on top of the coal seam, so where the coal had been mined away the fossilized forest was visible in the ceiling of the mine.
Forest snapshot
Heres what the miners and other scientists saw underground: Relatively narrow passageways wind through the cave, marked off with stout 100-foot-wide pillars to ensure the roof doesnt collapse.
Its like in some bizarre Roman temple with tons of Corinthian pillars that are 100 feet across and only six feet tall, Elrick told LiveScience. As youre walking down these passageways you see these pillars of coal on either side of you and above youimagine an artists canvas painted a flat grey and that is sort of what the grey shale above the coal looks like.
The largest ever found, the fossil forest covers an area of about 40 square miles, or nearly the size of San Francisco. This ancient assemblage of flora is thought to be one of the first rainforests on Earth, emerging during the Upper Carboniferous, or Pennsylvanian, time period that extended from about 310 million to 290 million years ago.
A reconstruction of the ancient forest showed that like todays rainforests, it had a layered structure with a mix of plants now extinct: Abundant club mosses stood more than 130-feet high, towering over a sub-canopy of tree ferns and an assortment of shrubs and tree-sized horsetails that looked like giant asparagus.
[the rest of the article at Yahoo News ... ]
When a tree grows it will have branches on it. The wood in the branch is at right angles to the tree.
When you saw the tree for boards, the branch shows up as a round area at a right angle to the board. That is a knot.
I saw a piece of coal that had that in it, so that shows that the coal came from a tree.
You may have thought I was talking about a knot like a knot in a rope. I wasn't. It was a knot like a knot in a board.
Beautiful.
At the southernmost part of Oregon, where I5 goes over the summit, there is a spot where you can see the layers of rock for something like 200 feet tall on both sides of the freeway.
I was standing there one day having a smoke and I notived these snaky like things inbetween the layers. So I risked it all and climbed up about 30 feet and broke a couple of them out.
Definitely fossils. Best I can figure is petrified tree roots. Cool!
The pictures show that the leaves retain a green color, which would be the result of chlorophyll, a green photosynthetic pigment found in most plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. How can a 300 million year old fossil, or even one a few thousand years old, retain that pigment unless it was somehow preserved almost instantaneously by some catastrophic event?
You are right, of course, but your thesis will never pass “peer review.”
Doesn’t aggravate me, just curios .....
Thanks for the information. You’re right - I wasn’t thinking tree knot. :)
Pangea!
Science and logic beats hokey mythology anyday.
That being said, I truly would put my life on the line the defend your beliefs. ;-)
Researchers Probe Fossilized Rain Forest
Townhall | 4/23/07
Posted on 04/23/2007 11:44:05 PM EDT by Valin
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1822425/posts
...thanks to tidal rhythms, the mud deposited on top of this forest is layered, so years can be counted as with the rings of a tree. The 15 feet of sediment that blankets the fossils was laid down in four months -- instantaneously in geologic time. ["Fossils of a 300-Million-Year-Old Forest Found", Discover Magazine, Michael Abrams]
I love this kind of stuff,I always liked old things and digging for fossils and arrowheads,maybe thats why I became a coal miner. There are some strange things in coal,i have seen plenty of them,but the one thing I remember well was a piece of wood,actually a board! no kidding, i picked up a lump of coal that had discoloration,and the crust broke off of it and there was a board,square as any board,looked like wood,actually it was wood,stuck right in a lump of coal.that wood was put there as the coal formed,it was stuck right in the lump.Sadly after keeping it a few years,the kids did it in ,as they did with a lot of old stuff I had. It is a true story though.
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Sounds like you haven't ever actually been to the Hoh Rain Forest. There is some amazing stuff there that is nothing like other Northwest forests. (Pretty long drive out there though. :)
isnt the definition of a rain forest one where the humidity is so high that it actually rains moisture?
The definition of temperate rain forest is based on the amount of precipitation and the average temperature. The Hoh Rain Forest easily qualifies with about 3 times the minimum requirement of precipitation.
The Hoh Rain Forest is on the backside of my parents property albeit maybe sixty miles west ... I’ve been through it.. I’ve seen heavier moss on trees in the Cascades. Everything I’ve ever read on rain forests is that the humidity is so high it actually condenses and falls as rain ... but in any event, now all jungles are referred to as rain forests which is not entirely accurate ....
I'm not sure that your theory of rain forests producing their own rain within the forest canopy is accurate. In fact as far as I can tell from some limited research, this is an imaginary view. Some rain forests do recycle a large percentage of their moisture, but only after it goes up into clouds. Rain forests have that name because there is a lot of rain there. But it is ordinary rain that comes out of clouds in the sky.
They call the Hoh Rain forest here in Washington a rain forest. Outside that area it’s not. The Hoh is in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula where the weather is exactly the same but only the Hoh is classified by the DOI as a rain forest. All forests are being called rain forests for not other reason than political correctness...again, from what I read - the origin of the name “Rain Forest” came out of the Amazon where the humidity is so high that when the moisture collects on the leaves become so heavy it falls as rain - hence the term.
You are wrong. The Hoh is internationally recognized as a rain forest because it has an f-load of rain. It is a temperate rain forest as opposed to a tropical rain forest.
The Hoh is in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula where the weather is exactly the same but only the Hoh is classified by the DOI as a rain forest.
According to the National Park Service there are actually 4 rain forests on the Olympic Peninsula, in the valleys of the Quinault, Queet, Hoh, and Bogachiel Rivers.
Here is a precipitation map of Washington State. As you can see the very darkest purple color on the map, indicating the highest level of precipitation in the state, only occurs in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula.
All forests are being called rain forests for not other reason than political correctness...
and RAIN.
again, from what I read - the origin of the name Rain Forest came out of the Amazon where the humidity is so high that when the moisture collects on the leaves become so heavy it falls as rain - hence the term.
I challenge you to find one online reference that backs up your description. And make sure it refers to a rain forest and not a "cloud forest".
I live on the Olympic Peninsula ...on the west side of Hood Canal ... I don’t care what the DOI calls Hoh and surrounding “rain forests” .... they ain’t .....not in the original intent of the name ... it was changed for/in political correctness .... there are no more plain forests anywhere, they’re all rain forests .... no jungles either ... why hasn’t the DOI called the forested area(s) I live in “rain forests”? It’s the same climate same rainfall same trees ....
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