Science
Related: About this forumAncient forest lies 10 miles off the Alabama coast (video, gallery) (al.com)
Published: Sunday, September 02, 2012, 5:34 AM
By Ben Raines, Press-Register
Sixty feet beneath the green waves of the Gulf of Mexico, ten miles from the nearest land, stands an ancient forest of giant trees.
Covered in dense carpets of sea anemones, crawling with spidery arrow crabs and toadfish, the sprawling stumps of massive cypress trees spread across the seafloor.
Unmistakable to eyes that have seen the cypress growing today in the swamps of the Gulf Coast, the trunks bear the jagged, craggy outline that is the hallmark of the species. Away from each stump lies another clue, a telltale ring of cypress knees, the knobby wood outgrowths believed to help the trees survive in the soupy mud of the souths river deltas.
The trees run along a small drop off along the Gulfs bottom south of the Fort Morgan peninsula. For hundreds of yards, the stumps follow the lazy meanders of what appears to be an ancient river channel that runs to the north, toward the modern day Mobile-Tensaw Delta, which drains Alabama and portions of Tennessee, Georgia and Mississippi.
Drifting along the river channel, floating over the edge of a sunken forest rendered in the blues and greens of the deep sea is enchanting.
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more: http://blog.al.com/live/2012/09/ancient_forest_lies_10_miles_o.html
Please pardon the hyperbolic title seen in the video ...
orpupilofnature57
(15,472 posts)The Wielding Truth
(11,411 posts)Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)12,000 years old? Just a theory! "Trees"? Just a theory. Underneath the "Ocean"? The Ocean is just a Theory.
That all that blue stuff is "water"? Just a theory.
Alabama is, likewise, just a Theory, as is the Theory that "it" has a "coast".
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)Thank you so much for posting this..
niyad
(113,062 posts)Scuba
(53,475 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts)HooptieWagon
(17,064 posts)It reminds me of the stories about British trawlers bringing up chunks of peat , fossils, and artifacts from dragging their nets over the Dogger Bank in the North Sea. Geologists believe the Dogger Bank is the remains of the ancient land bridge connecting Britain to the European Continent.