The last time Pleistocene, the forest, 60 feet underwater off the coast of Alabama, saw the light of day, receding glaciers still covered huge parts of North America, locking much of the water in ice off the planet.

A Nautilus report specified that the sea level in the Gulf of Mexico was several hundred feet lower and the continent remained the mammoths and saber-toothed cats' territory.

 

Essentially, the towering bald cypress trees, roughly more than six feet wide, stood located in a low-lying inland swamp, several miles from the coast.

According to Kristine DeLong, a paleoclimatologist at Louisiana State University, to discover a preserved landscape from that time period is quite unusual. She added, the fact it is offshore is making it even more extraordinary.

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Drowning Forest
(Photo : Wikimedia Commons/National Ocean Service)
Many stumps and remnants found underneath the water, specifically, in the drowned Pleistocene forest.


Drowned Forest Dead, Quickly Buried 70,000 Years Ago

DeLong has been working in the underwater forest for the past 10 years, using it to understand further climatic changes in the Gulf and attempting to tease apart how it came to be quite preserved.

The trees themselves have proven to be very old for carbon dating approaches, although DeLong and her colleagues have been able to approximate that the forest, which is detailed in a ScienceDirect report, died and was quickly buried from 50,000 to 70,000 years back.

He had never seen the tiny mussel in the past saying, she thought, "What on Earth is this thing?" Additionally, the trees do not exhibit indications of impairment from disease, fire or insects.

The scientists think the forest was possibly wiped out in a severe flood, or by a saltwater influx from rising seas. Whatever occurrence killed off the forest was sudden, explained DeLong.

Tree Rings

Records of tree rings specify that as trees were stressed for the past eight decades of their lives, they all died within a single year.

Given how well preserved the wood has been, even the bark being intact, the trees must have been in mud soon after, which shielded them from decomposing.

This is usually what one would find in a swamp where he doesn't have a lot of water mixing and the absence of oxygen, added DeLong.

As sea levels rose, sand covered all traces and mud of the forest disappeared underneath the waves. More so, the forest stayed hidden until in 2004, Hurricane Ivan hit through the Gulf Mexico.

Marine Animals Rapidly Taking Advantage of the New Habitat

Ivan had already devastated numerous Caribbean islands and killed more than 60 people before it made a landfall in Alabama with sustained winds roughly 120 mph.

This strong storm kicked up 90-foot waves in the Gulf, scouring nearly 10 feet of sand off the seafloor, excavating a half square-mile field of significantly well-preserved stamps and forest residues.

Marine animals rapidly took advantage of the new habitat. Whereas a wood-eating invertebrate, which is described in the National Trust website,  such as the shipworm, may appear like a strange place to search for a drug compound, the study investigators have been growingly turning toward the ocean for new drugs.

A lot of marine organisms, particularly those that live in high-density ecosystems like coral reefs, are using chemical defense systems to shield themselves, as well as their space.

Related information about Alabama's underwater forest is shown on CBS News's YouTube video below:

 

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