An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change

[MindMover]

In the clammy depths of a southern Illinois coal mine lies the largest fossil forest ever discovered, at least 50 times as extensive as the previous contender.

Scientists are exploring dripping passages by the light of headlamps, mapping out an ecosystem from 307 million years ago, just before the world’s first great forests were wiped out by global warming. This vast prehistoric landscape may shed new light on climate change today.

Dating from the Pennsylvanian period of the Carboniferous era, the forest lies entombed in a series of eight active mines. They burrow through the rich seams of the Springfield Coal, a nationally important energy resource that underlies much of Illinois and two neighboring states and has been heavily mined for decades.

Pushed downward over the ages by the crushing weight of rock layers higher up, the Springfield forest lies at varying depths, 250 to 800 feet underground. The researchers have only sampled it so far, in the vicinity of Galatia, Illinois, but they think it extends more than 100 miles in one direction; its width has not been ascertained. An earlier discovery by the same team, the Herrin Coal forest farther north in Illinois, is just two miles long.

“Effectively you’ve got a lost world,” said Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has explored the site. “It’s the closest thing you’ll find to time travel,” he added.

Curiously, the forest can be viewed only from below. The scientists crane their necks, illuminating the ceiling with miners’ helmet lamps. Hundreds of millions of years ago, trees and other plants grew atop thick peat that eventually compressed into coal; when that was excavated, the forest’s fossilized remains could be seen in the mine’s shale ceiling.

“It’s a botanical Pompeii, buried in a geological instant,” said William A. DiMichele, a paleobiologist and curator of fossil plants at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and one of the forest’s discoverers. He believes it was gently entombed by floods that successively washed through a swamp.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/underground-fossil-forest-in-illinois-offers-clues-on-climate-change.html?


Poll: Does looking into past geological history help us today ..?

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[alfredo]

1. I'd love to see that.

[Nihil]

3. Yep - before it's dug up and burned.

It's going to be fascinating for future geologists (of whatever species) who will have
to work out why there are so many discontinuities in strata that hold traces of
fossil fuels ...

[alfredo]

4. In our area it is only sea life, no land living creatures. We live on a dome of

450 million year old limestone. The newer rock eroded away millions of years ago.



That limestone makes for strong bones in horses, and raises the PH of the water used in Kentucky Bourbon.

[libinnyandia]

2. Wait a minute! I thought the Bible says the world is only 6000 years old.:o)

[alfredo]

5. Those are Deity years. 1 year = 800,000 years.

[Bigmack]

6. I LOVE it!

I never knew about Deity years until this post! Thanks a BUNCH! Ms Bigmack

[libinnyandia]

7. That's a good one!

[PufPuf23]

8. Absolutely. Genuine high research potential.

Perhaps inconvenient data for some?

Science and research and education and applied management of the natural world has become ever more politicized and propagandized as human population has increased, industrialized, and geographical-cultural ideologies "warred and competed".