Plant Fossils in the Pacific Northwest

so plant fossils of the pacific northwest that is the topic are you aware that we could all go out into the parking lot right now jump in our rigs drive 45 minutes north we could get up in the wenatchee national forest pretty easily on some logging roads and we could find plant fossils probably before it got dark tonight they're all over the place in the bedrock north of town you got to know where to go you got to find the right logging road the right forest service road you got to find some sandstone and shale and once we get to the right out crop we'd throw the truck into park we'd get the five gallon buckets out of the back of the vehicle we'd get the rock hammers and the sledges and the chisels and the and the screwdrivers and the paint brushes and the you know everything and we'd collect we'd have a grand old time and we would find hundreds and hundreds of fossilized leaves north of town leaves from palm trees palm leaves the size of dinner plates there's an unlimited supply of these things 45 minutes north of town let's say we had a great time and we did that tonight and then we come back tomorrow night and we say let's do that again and we jump in our vehicles and we go the other way within 30 minutes we could be in the yakima canyon or up at your pocket or 30 miles to the east of here and go to the town of vantage and this time we'd be in the desert we wouldn't be up in the forest we'd be out on the desert probably the wind would be howling right it's green this time of year there'd be some sagebrush and some cheat grass and if we knew which layer to work with and it's basalt lava rock this time south of town we would find impressive tree trunks in the basalt lava from long ago and the most famous of those fossilized tree trunks that petrified wood are ginkgo trees so my first question tonight are those palm trees north of town and those ginkgo trees south of town from the same forest is that the same time that we're talking about put that one on hold for just a second one of the lectures we did last year in this series i shared the excitement that we all had because somebody from the burke museum in seattle found the first dinosaur bone ever found in washington they found it in san juan islands a fragment of a left thigh bone of a t-rex first dinosaur bone ever found in washington we recorded that lecture we put it on youtube and i started getting a bunch of comments last spring and the comments some of the comments were like hey i think you blew it on that dinosaur thing because i live in yakima and they dug up a dinosaur like 25 years ago or i live in granger we got statues of dinosaurs all over the place there's dinosaurs we got them right here and moxie and sila and tri-cities in seattle they kept talking about all these dinosaurs being pulled out of the ground so i replied to each comment and i said no those were mammoths and they come right back and go i agree those dinosaurs were really mammoth they were really big so there's confusion there's confusion i think among many people if they give it much thought most of these fossils plants and animals are just from prehistoric times and they're all kind of back there together the palm trees and the ginkgo trees and the dinosaurs and the woolly mammoths it's all just back there uh hell we're throwing some cavemen for fun right it's all just it's just back there so one of the main things i want to do tonight is make sure that when we talk about specific plant fossils we know where we are in our geologic history each of those plant fossils or animal fossils are talking about a specific environment from the past and plant fossils are famous for being very sensitive to conditions to climate conditions and if we change our fossils through time we change our climate through time so the plant fossils are important to study nuts because they're cool not just because we can throw them in the back of our truck and bring them in and put them in the front yard but they are important for scientific study as well so i've got a quick little timeline up here i'm going to do this very quickly these are in millions of years this is a science lecture 66 million years ago most of us know that the dinosaurs of the world the dinosaurs of the world became extinct there are no dinosaur bones worldwide in rocks that are younger than 66 million years ago not one dinosaur bone is younger than 66. so this is the famous extinction of the dinosaurs and below that we've got lots of dinosaurs around the world that dinosaur bone on sushi island in the san juans came out of some silt stone 80 million years old our plant fossils tonight here in the pacific west northwest are all younger than the dinosaur time great now the mammoths dinosaurs mammoths is there really a difference of course there is the mammoths are an ice age creature the woolly mammoths and i can just pick the number three for simplicity but during the ice age the last 2.6 million years we had these woolly mammoths dominating much of the world including central washington here so i don't care really personally about the anatomical differences between dinosaurs and mammoths i'm interested in the fact that they represent a difference of more than 60 million years worth of time that's where i'm coming from but this is not a lecture on plant files excuse me this is not a lecture on animal fossils it's a lecture on plant fossils and there are lots of different plant fossils i've got tons of visuals for you tonight tons of video clips and beautiful pictures and and we're between these two times older excuse me younger than the dinosaurs older than the mammoths but i want to zero in on two key dates a bunch of plant fossils from 56 million years ago and those are our palms up at bluetooth pass and the ginkgo trees out by vantage yakima canyon badger pocket those are roughly 16 million years ago so they're not the same forest they're separated by 40 million years so we're gonna do some things with these two time frames primarily and then we'll dabble in a few other spots it's down in oregon northern idaho et cetera between these two things okay let's keep it moving because i want to make sure we get to all these wonderful visuals so i'm going to leave that on the blackboard i'm not going to change it that's our little reminder of our times that we're talking about so um why palm trees why palm trees 56 million years ago and to be fair the swap formation has a range of ages but a bunch of the palm fawns are coming from 56 million years ago well we know that palm fronds and palm trees like hot and humid conditions we're from central washington if we go on a spring break trip we're going to take a bunch of pictures of palm trees to prove we're in a warm beautiful place like we made a good choice look at this and there's a palm tree right they're not here i know yakima is the palm springs of washington but there's no palm trees down there okay so they're subtropical palm trees palm palmettos they love subtropical conditions let's make it as simple as possible and for our purposes tonight let's just say we need hot and humid conditions we need temperature hotter than current day in central washington and we sure as hell need a bunch more precipitation if we want to grow palm trees here north of ellensburg well i want to bust a couple of myths i've been out with a lot of people through the years and i keep hearing these two stories kind of these folks that have all the answers you know and both of these stories are wrong there's a third one that actually is accurate and what we want to hit hard tonight so one two three why was it hot and humid here 56 million years ago for these palm leaves and other things there were big swamps swamps recorded in these bedrock layers north of town one talks about the cascades and in fact mentioning that there was no cascades at the time and so far so good we know the cascade mountains don't we the cascade volcanoes right here these are the cascades and if i draw a picture inside view of the cascades or where this is east and this is west and here's the pacific ocean offshore we know about the rain shadow effect don't we and the idea is that we get a bunch of moisture in off the pacific ocean seattle gets a lot of rain and over here in ellensburg at the morgan auditorium we don't get nearly as much rain we get less than 10 inches of rain a year here in ellensburg that's because of the rain shadow effect the fact that these air masses with moisture in them have to get up and over this barrier the cascades and by the time those winds are over here they've lost most of their moisture so the idea is oh we got palm leaves in central washington well those palms are from such a long time ago that the cascade mountains were not here and a bunch of moisture could get all the way over to eastern washington that's true so far the cascades have a forty four zero a forty million year history the cascades are younger than these palm fossils so so far i'm in we are getting a bunch more moisture much more precipitation in central washington but what's the problem we need temperature we need much warmer conditions we need tropical conditions in washington and just not having the cascades is not going to do that plus there are just as many palms fossilized from 56 million years ago in bellingham on the other side of the cascades and in fact those sandstones and shales used to be continuous beds in other words they're older than the cascades and they continue across that region and the cascades have essentially grown up through the middle of those two sedimentary beds so palm fronds and bellingham palm fronds here same beds predating the cascades but to say that the cascades were not here and that's why we had palm trees is not the way to go next one that is wrong this is mean-spirited i don't mean to peddle it this way but i guess i am have you caught yourself saying this to somebody oh yeah we got palm we got palm fossils around here have you ever heard of something called continental drift you want you want subtropical you want it hot and humid here it's real easy we go back in time and north america used to be at the equator case closed that's nice and convenient it's wrong but it's nice and convenient how do we know that's wrong how do we know that north america during this time of our of our palm fronds was not at the equator uh well let me show it to you graphically so here's the concept here's uh the equator north america today is completely north of the equator the latitude here is 47 degrees north so if you are a proponent of idea number two you say to explain the palms we need north america 56 million years ago to be partly in the northern hemisphere partly in the southern hemisphere and to have subtropical conditions and even tropical conditions throughout much of north america that is incorrect because we know precisely where north america was 56 million years ago and it was not at the equator north america 56 million years ago was farther north than it is right now we were further away from the equator than we are now we weren't straddling the equator i'll show you some beautiful animations in a bit to back that up north america was straddling the equator long ago but that was back during pangaea time that was back during the last super continent where florida was in the southern hemisphere but if we put in north america 56 million years ago it's farther north than it is today so north america has done this and then this in the last 200 million years and you're like well how do you know that we have ocean floor basalts of different ages we have ways to reconstruct where these continents used to be located at different spots at different times nobody's arguing that when you look at the re the research a post-pangea so if one is incorrect and two is incorrect what is the answer i came for the answer you say the answer is this petum p-e-t-m it turns out that our palm fronds in washington are not a washington story they're not even a pacific northwest story it's a global story there's a bunch of new evidence now that starting about 56 million years ago there was a dramatic increase in global temperatures it happened very quickly a bunch of carbon was pumped into the atmosphere and we have plant fossils we have sediments on the ocean floors we have all seven continents recording this dramatic p-e-t-m it's called the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum that's a mouthful it's a hot time the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum it's still a bit of a mystery why that event happened why that sudden spike in temperatures lasted a couple hundred thousand years and it ended pretty much as quickly as it began and we as a globe have not been as warm since that time 56 million years ago are you here what i'm saying i'm saying that our palm fossils just north of town are part of a global warm event i've got a couple video clips to show that as well but we have palm trees at this time we have palm fossils at this time in the arctic we have palm fossils around the world at latitudes that make no sense with their current global position so that's the first major message tonight some of these plant fossils are telling us about a global climate history and we'll leave it at that until we get more images to look at in just a bit wonderful let's switch gears let's actually do a little razzle dazzle here and flip the chalkboard around i was ahead of you now i was in here washing the chalkboards and drawing out something because i knew i wanted to make sure we got to enough time to make this all work in front of you so are you with me we're leaving the time of the palm fronds temporarily we'll have all sorts of visuals to look at but let's go closer to present day let's go 16 million years ago and go to the time of what kind of trees ginkgo trees what kind of rock basalt now we're out in the desert we're leaving our current wenatchee national forest and we're going out into the desert and many of you are local and many of you know about the ginkgo petrified forest state park that is our focus now for the next for the next 10 minutes or so okay wonderful p-e-t-m you know what that's too awkward let's come up with something else let's uh from this point forward in this lecture let's call that that hot time uh 56 hot okay like i'm a quarterback all right like i'm like i'm on the line of scrimmage i'm monitoring audible here 56 hot 56 hot okay so 56 up 56 million years ago global warm time now there's another one of these climatic changes 16 million years ago mmco also awkward mid myocene climatic optimum this is less important so i'm not even going to repeat it we're not going to use it that much but this is another time that we're choosing because there's this change there's a kind of a mysterious change in global climate okay we're out of blue it pass you okay over there all right so vantage is here we are focusing on vantage this horizon goes over to yakima canyon as well we have many of you know this we've had many lectures on this this is the time of the great lavas the great lavas where a huge fissure opens up over by moses lake 16 million years ago and coming out of that crack an amazing lava flow comes out of the crack and generally flows to the west parts of this ginkgo lava flow i there i named it the ginkgo flow is the star of the show goes all the way to the oregon coast parts of the oregon coast are made out of lava rock that came from a crack near moses lake i'm not making this up and the ginkgo lava flow is important to us tonight because if i use white it's the ginkgo flow one basalt lava flow out of a stack of 300 of these flows and each flow has their own crack by the way we're just zeroing in on one of 300 basalt flows and it's got all the wood it's got all the tree trunks in it it's got all the tree trunks so these white circles are logs petrified logs and there is a major mystery that remains with these logs and that's what i want to get to before we turn our attention to the visuals so you're like i thought these other circles were the logs that was way ahead of you these are not logs so here's one basalt flow another another another another i've got five on this sketch in cross-section here's people walking around on the surface and some of those basalt lava flows have these circular features at the bottom called pillows and pillows are these strange kind of circular looking features they look like brown basketballs in cross-section but i'm doing this with my fingers because pillows are actually crackling fingers or crackling worms of basalt going out into water that's a key part of our story so this flow came in it has pillows at the base that means there was a crack over here in eastern washington it produced some basaltic hawaiian-like lava it flowed into water in central washington pillows mean water but not all the basalts have pillows here's another basalt layer lava flow doesn't have any pillows at the base which means it flowed over dry land and then another flow the ginkgo flow has pillows and then this one does not by the way some of the basalts have wonderful vertical cracks to form columns that many of us know other basalts don't have columns they don't have cracks this is a mystery but we're not talking about that tonight we're talking about the ginkgo flow yielding and i'm not exaggerating thousands and thousands of tree trunks that are in the lava flow now before we quit tonight we're going to feature a gentleman by the name of george beck and he was the geologist at the college here in town from 1925 until 1959 and his claim to fame was not only teaching students and mentoring students but discovering the petrified forest advantage convincing the government or park agencies to preserve that land in the form of a state park to create the museum and to do all sorts of research on the logs so much of our work tonight is coming right from george beck's research so he was studying all these logs that were you pulling right out of the base of the ginkgo flow and he was a laughingstock that's maybe too strong but he got challenged by a lot of paleontologists around the world when he started publishing papers they say george you can't pull petrified wood out of lava that's impossible and he says why don't you take a trip over here to ellensburg and i'll show you i will go out to vantage i'll show you there's no wood below there's no wood above there's wood right in the pillow zone of the ginkgo flow and they're like well how did the logs survive why didn't they just burn up in the heat of the lava you know the answer there's pillows and logs together and what do the pillows mean water the water is there to protect the wood the water the logs were waterlogged and there was all sorts of steam and other drama when the ginkgo flow came from the east and flowed into the area so with a lot of the visuals tonight we're going to focus on the wood at the base of the ginkgo lava and this thing here which is not a lava flow but it's a layer of sediment it's a layer of sand essentially called the vantage sediment the vantage sediment we'll see a bunch of images with the ginkgo lava flow directly on top of the vantage sediment and there's been a lot of work recently let me enlarge the vantage sediment for you here a little bit if you allow me to do that in many places the vantage sediment has many layers and they're called grated beds which means that each of these little beds in the vantage horizon have sand grains at the bottom i know it looks like pillows now forgive me and then we get finer and finer sediment as we go up that's a graded bed one sedimentary horizon which in the within the vantage sediment that goes coarse to fine sediment then we jump to the next one of these mini beds same thing course to find next one course to find something is happening repetitive lee whatever terrible grammar within the vantage settlement do these little miniature beds have anything to do with these logs i'm beating around the bush let me hit it right on we still don't have a for sure answer why we have all of these logs sitting together and you're like what are you saying what's so hard you got logs you already talked about it the pillows are there the water protected the logs there are two dozen different kinds of species of logs sitting together he goes to his wallet and in between the safeway club card and the fred meyer card he pulls out a cheat sheet let me tell you very quickly all the different kinds of tree trunks that are sitting next to each other in the lava flow this is a freak show cypress hickory walnut elm oak birch beets tupelo gum sweet gum cedar spruce sequoia chestnut douglas fir ginkgo maple pine all right in this layer now you know about trees not all those trees can live in peaceful harmony right next to each other locking arms right some needs uplands some need swamps some need something in between these have to have been brought from a long distance these tree trunks had to have been transported tens of miles and the mystery is where did they come from let me give you a little bit more about the wood it's called the ginkgo horizon and i focused on the ginkgo trees but they are rare there's hardly any ginkgo logs in the base of the ginkgo flow that's maybe a surprise to you you're driving on i-90 you see a brown sign it says ginkgo petrified forest hell let's take this exit and see what this is all about there's hardly any ginkgo wood of the logs exposed advantage 50 of them are douglas fir and spruce 20 percent are elm 5 walnut 5 sweet gum 5 oak five percent locust rare ginkgo so the idea is we need to do something to get all these logs here in central washington and the last concept for the chalkboard is after many of the lavas were developed there was a lake called lake vantage and you're like well wait a minute now i've i've heard about this lake in central washington during the ice age and all the water got stopped at wallula gap remember now we're at 16 million years ago the ice age hasn't begun yet we are pre-ice age this is not lake lewis these are not the slack water sediment beds this is an older lake from the great flood basalt time and this lake probably existed because one of the earlier lavas blocked a bunch of rivers maybe blocked the columbia for a while and developed lake vantage we need lake vantage here why we have pillows when the ginkgo flow comes in it's going to plow right into this temporary freshwater lake called lake vantage but you hear what i'm saying i hope where are the logs coming from the guy george beck back in the 30s had a pet idea and most of his papers follows through on his idea he thought all those logs that are petrified right here in kittitas county are from the okanagan and maybe some in british columbia and that there were periodic floods not ice age floods periodic floods river floods that would get a big old law it's got to be a big flood we're carrying huge logs they're not petrified yet by the way they're now just tree trunks living tree trunks dead tree trunks let's carry them down to central washington but beck kept talking about this river of the north bringing all this material south and dumping those logs into lake vantage kind of like today's spirit lake up by saying helens all those dead logs have been there since 1980 floating and some have sunk to the bottom maybe same idea here there is some geologic evidence for the the logs coming from the north much of the sediment in the vantage sediment has muscovite in it and muscovite is a mineral that is common in rocks in the okanagan and not common in southern washington there's a couple other evidence as well there's some paleo current indicators as well but in the last 30 40 years there's been a new idea if you can call the last 30 40 years new and you may have heard this one instead of beck's okanagan source for the logs some geologists have said why can't we have volcanic eruptions in the cascades we've got the cascades now we're 16 million years ago why can't we have a volcanic mudflow come out of the mountains come out of the cascades and bring logs from the cascades and dump them into lake washington we can even have more elevation differences think of the elevation difference from the high cascades down to here and all the different trees that we have at different elevations can't we have a lahar a volcanic mudflow pick up a bunch of those trees at different elevations and bring them down and dump them in so right now those are the two competing ideas are they okanagan logs or are they cascade logs are they both or is it neither that's where we are in the research and so there's a lot of attention given to the vantage sediment looking for clues of the okanagan versus the cascades and then of course there's continued work with the logs themselves this is the last thing i'll see with the chalkboard some pumice has been found right at the base of the ginkgo so right beneath the logs right at the top of the vantage sediment there's some pumice that helps confirm that we have a lahar story that i have a cascade story instead of an okanogan story but here's my biggest point before we quit the chalkboards there are no logs in the vantage sediment itself if the vantage sediment is the quote unquote key to unlocking this mystery why don't we have a bunch of logs or woods or branches or acorns or anything in these 15 repetitive debris flow things if you're a cascade person you want each of these to be distal parts of a lahar if you're an okanogan person you want these to be these river floods coming down but there's no wood in this stuff the wood the logs are all up within the pillow zone no roots none of those trees were in place every log advantage was moved and from where is this life and death no are people's lives at stake no they're not but it is a tantalizing mystery that continues to be worked on by just a handful of paleobotanists this is the time of the night where you turn to your neighbor and say i love plant fossils with all of my heart and that will give us a chance to turn on the screen here thank you i brought a plant fossa with me tonight and it's up here on the front it's a beautiful palm frond collected by george beck himself so i'd be happy to show this to you after the lecture let's go ahead and really sink in to all these visuals i have planned for you that's a dinosaur where is it that's an advantage that's confusing oh i guess if we're outside of the state park and we have our own little gem shop we can do what we want so we'll put a dinosaur that has nothing to do with ginkgo petrified wood next to ginkgo petrified wood and inside of the gem shop when the dinosaurs roamed the earth the ginkgo tree flourished as a large family of prehistoric plants all over the world there it is it's written it must be true we have a mammoth also confusing this is all in the same place oh but now we're in granger sure we've got dinosaurs all over the place in statute form there's not one dinosaur bone down below these are the beds at grainger that have produced mammoths not dinosaurs we know the difference now hopefully we can spread that word to others but this is a mammoth site run by this school town in town pat lubinsky and others excavated a mammoth near sela washington and that is wrapping up now but students have been actively participating in digging up parts of that mammoth at the wieners there's a tusk that was found in downtown seattle as they were creating yet another block of amazon buildings a few summers ago this truly is the only dinosaur that has yet been found in the state of washington in sushi island san juans there's the fragment of the bone on the left on the right and there's a appropriate sized uh left femur of a tyrannosaurus rex dinosaurs mammoth not the same thing that's not our topic tonight but i feel better thank you for listening so we are in the morgan auditorium and i promise that if we headed north we'd head to the palm fronds if we got to the stewards we'd gone too far same thing from cleoelum cleoland was 30 miles away we could do the same thing head north out of cleolam head up past the tiana way community forest and find the palm fossils so up we go into those woods into those dug furs and ponderosa pines and one of the best places to look for palm fossils is on the old blue at highway blew it past most of us know the area but this is the new bluet road and it's difficult to stop the traffic is loud it's dangerous but the old blewett road is still there and it was the main road between seattle and spokane back before the depression and that road is still there and it was last paved in the 1950s and starting in 1956 all the traffic was sent over to new blueitt and so it is truly a pleasant experience to be on this old road here's the old model ts back in the depression they would back up as they approached the steepest part of bluet pass and it was a landmark for many cross-state travelers before the 1930s so it's a great place to study to find to discover and it's all for free you can park right in the middle of the road and chance you won't see anybody on a beautiful sunday afternoon i encourage you if you haven't been up there to look around what are these layers this is 56 hot this is the sandstones and shales with the palm fawns and other kinds of plant fossils from that global warm time oh my god are there any plant fossils left look you've got huge groups that are up there i haven't taken them all there's still plenty to look for many of you have been up there hunting over the years and there's an unlimited supply wonderful we've take school groups up there as well and there's a long history of central washington university geology taking people to study and to collect more about that coming in a bit so this is a typical slab of sandstone and or shale from the swap formation and you can see what appear to be little fragments of palm leaves and that is true the fragments are there but some of the beauties have been collected this collected by george beck himself in a display case that's right next to my office i walk by this every day for the last 30 years and i'm eventually about to give a talk hey it turns out i was on spring break with my wife a couple weeks ago we just happened to go to charleston south carolina we just happened to be taking a little walk in the swamp what a coincidence crazy so their beautiful modern analog to what central washington was like the coastal plains and the hot humid conditions with very weak winters allowing us to have these amazing forests with swamps and cypress and alligators and palmettos paul meadows a woman for scale back to the paleo back to the 56 hot uh shales and sandstones now if we're over by bellingham same beds but they call it the chuck-a-nut formation over there so wes engstrom from liberty washington last summer i said when i found this on the surface this part was showing and i just started hammering on it and luckily hammered in the right spot so that it opened up into a three-dimensional fossil it just chipped a little bit off there less extra fossil hunter among other things so more displays uh impressions of palm tree trunks and other leaves from this walk near liberty now if we hop over to northwestern washington in the bellingham area it's a bunch of trees it's a bunch of precipitation but if we use lidar we can actually see those beds of sandstone and shale that are complexly folded but yet they reveal amazing palm leaves same time 56 hot this is in the geology department at western washington university and these are just the beginning of these wonderful professional photographs from tad dilhoff who's at the burke museum in seattle he has been especially helpful putting this lecture together so thank you to tad dilhoff for these wonderful photographs and last year before they closed the current burke and they're about to reopen a new burke museum i just snapped a bunch of these photos with my eye phone without asking anybody any permission wonderful about 10 years ago there was a big landslide in the foothills of mount baker and in addition to the landslide being interesting it revealed a whole new crop of amazing palm fossils in whatcom county look at those beauties we're focusing on the palm leaves but you should know that there's a lot of exotic leaf types from that former swamp at 56 million years ago so i grabbed this off the internet before we went to charleston a couple weeks ago trying to get an idea a simulation of the palm leaves and the palmettos and the cypress and the swamps and thought well that'll be good for the lecture that'll give us at least a rough idea for what it looked like here during the eocene time in central washington and then here's our hike two weeks ago in the swamps of south carolina looks exactly like that complete with palmettos and dense uh mats of those palm leaves that have died and have been added to the swamp floor amazing stuff so the carolinas or the everglades in florida is really what we want to think about for hot and humid conditions here in central washington back to washington today in addition to blewittpass many of us know we can go up to tainam to the west of ellensburg and get those same beds in those same palm fronds pretty easily so if you've got a young family you've got kids who have limited attention spans i promise that if we can get to the right spot and i'll send you some directions if you're interested you can get to a place where within 10 minutes you can easily find stuff like this oftentimes fragments of things of course it's not the huge palm fronds that's more difficult to find but there's definitely palm leaves and other kinds of leaf fossils within an hour's drive of here free and available for all it's good wholesome clean fun all right i think we've had enough of 56 hot at least locally let's expand our view because it is a global story remember this thermal maximum time actually before we do that this is a wonderful map i've used a lot by john figgy who teaches geology in seattle this is washington during 56 hot there are no cascades the west coast of washington is at i-5 there's a south coast of washington running through granger where the dinosaurs live no no they don't they don't and we've got these poorly drained swamps and rivers coming from the northeast now uh to bust that myth so i can drive this global animation and let's keep our eye on north america you know like i'm not sure where north america is yet well let me go way ahead now you got north america let's go back in time let's go back in time there's north america 56 million years ago now can we get north america to the equator we can but it will only go back close to pangaea time so is it true that washington 56 million years ago was at the equator it was not this is not an idea these are carefully reconstructed maps to show that we were further north 56 million years ago than we are now wonderful so let's learn more about the ptem otherwise known as 56 hot according to me an enormous rain forest teeming with life trees insects pretty little birds primates are climbing up in the canopy while crocodiles and turtles swim in the rivers below beautiful isn't it now imagine this lush rainforest in the arctic [Music] there was a time not too long ago when the world warmed more than any human has ever seen so far this ancient warming took place over the course of just 200 000 years the blink of an eye in geologic time and it ended much like it began suddenly and mysteriously it all started 56 million years ago at the very end of the paleocene epoch back then life was still recovering from all the unpleasantness of the cretaceous paleogene extinction event which wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and things were already warm by today's standards there were no polar ice caps which meant sea levels were much higher and the continents which were just beginning to take a familiar shape were covered in habitats like temperate forests and deserts and a belt of rainforests around the equator but this environment was about to change in fewer than 20 000 years the global average temperature increased by 5 to 8 degrees celsius and the warming was greatest at higher latitudes so at the poles temperatures on land reached an average of 23 degrees celsius while the ocean waters got up to a balmy 20 degrees this means you could have gone for a comfy swim in the seas around antarctica this remarkable and sudden warming event is known as the paleocene paleocene-eocene thermal maximum or p-e-t-m and it had a massive effect on life on earth all right one of these days i'm gonna get brave enough to do a global climate lecture i'm not quite there yet but it's coming i'm feeling like it's necessary one of the ideas that i'm just going to throw out as conjecture is it possible that celezia that huge shield volcano with 14 times the volume of all the basalts in the pacific northwest is responsible for the 56 hot in other words that oceanic island with an amazing amount of basalt and plenty of carbon carbon dioxide coming out of the earth was precisely at 56 million years ago just throwing that out time for a professional diagram this is me at my desk with my colored pencils trying to keep track of all these different spots i know this is going to go quickly but i want if i'm giving a plant fossils lecture in the whole entire pacific northwest i want to make sure we get a little taste of all these spots not everyone but all the red words are washington plant fossil locations all the blue words are oregon plant fossil locations and there's a few greens in there getting us into idaho plant fossils of the pacific northwest and please note we've got our p e t m our 56 hot down low and another line going across at that mmco the mid myosin climactic optimum with our ginkgo trees and vantage canute berger from downtown seattle [Music] today we're at burke museum in the paleontology department the one thing people in the pacific northwest think they know is our climate but what a lot of people don't know is that the pacific northwest wasn't always the gray rainy haven that we think of it today about 50 million years ago palm trees thrived here so imagine the bellingham area you're in a palm forest something like you would find in central america think costa rica you move ahead maybe to 40 million years ago you're getting ginkgo trees that's a climate that's similar to the deep south in central oregon they've actually found fossils of banana plants you think of the pacific northwest you think of apples 44 million years ago was bananas so that's a great reason to transition to slightly younger plant fossils hold on to your hats now we're going to go all the way across the pacific northwest stopping at places that if you're a plant fossil enthusiast you've been to multiple times republic stone rose you've been your family with up there you've been collecting up there through the years in north central washington were slightly younger 53 to 45 million years ago kind of overlapping with swap formation time but look at these fantastic plant fossils and leaves coming from the republic area and these sedimentary beds preserved there many of these photos from tad dilhoff at the burke i've already mentioned that but they've got a treasure trove of fossils across the pacific northwest with amazing levels of preservation and some of these are ginkgos so we can get confused you know our ginkgo discussion tonight was 16 million years ago but here we go with some ginkgo trees as early as 53 million years ago and pine cones all from the republic area we're still in north central washington now slightly younger than 56 hot even flowers preserved in the klondike mountain formation isn't this amazing stone rose get it all right great grape leaves maple leaves so it's not a fossilized tree trunk story primarily in republic it's more of a leaf and delicate insect and fish story jump over to chalice idaho there's a giant sequoia tree stump 50 million years old related to the chalice volcanics i told you we were going to jump around central oregon now down by john day 48 to 39 million years ago what kind of fossils can we find especially in these lighter colored sediments we can find walnuts fossilized in the clarno formation 48 to 39 million years ago we can slice through the walnut back home rosalind well that's just a bunch of coal well technically that's plant fossil stuff isn't it we know how coal forms the coal beds of roseland in the upper count upper kittitas county are the result of swamp-like vegetative mats that are buried deeply enough to convert that vegetative matter into rock essentially coal and all through the tiana way community forest these spires of sandstone of the roslin formation are in amongst the coal beds back down to central oregon the john day now in the painted hills were getting younger 38 to 20 million years ago and in the john day redwood this is all at the high school there in fossil oregon if you've dug there 38 to 20 million years ago beach leaves birch winged fruit freaking helicopter from a maple tree clarkia if we jump over by saint mary's idaho a little town of clarkia and there was lake clarkia now let's be careful suddenly we're at 16 million years ago suddenly we are going to stop and realize we're at the time of our ginkgo petrified forest state park remember in the great lavas so the rest of tonight we're going to be basically in that mid maya scene so at the so thank you i need that now so this red line going from through the columbia river basalts heading all the way over to clarkia idaho will help us realize that there's a lot going on across the pacific northwest during the time of our crazy logs being carried from god knows where 16 million years ago in northern idaho in the clarkia there's an amazing amount of preservation of magnolia tulip tree leaves poplar leaves sweet gum again leaves instead of the tree trunks but ultimately telling the same story we're now into pollen and getting exquisite details of climatic conditions from the pollen in much of the fine-grained sediments in the clarkia area all photos from the burke museum if we jump over to spokane there's a series of beds pretty close to downtown you know the hangman creek area or laeta there's a whole area there this is again pre-ice age but we can preserve a lot of the leaves from a lot of the trees and other plants at this time in the spokane area and elm leaf and oak leaf from the laeta formation back down to central oregon back down to the john day country but these are the mescal areas that are helping us realize that we had this myocene scene with rhinoceros and other creatures among these exotic swamp-like creatures the mascot white hills and the fossils are coming from the white layers in central oregon and finally in the away country of southwestern idaho sucker creek so i don't know much about any of these places i have to confess to you i communicated with this buddy of mine tad dilhoff and said look if i'm giving a lecture on plant fossils in the northwest can you give me a list of places that i really should make sure to cover and he gave me all these photos and all these places and then when it came time to make an hour lecture i had to cut bait with a lot of this stuff so that's why we're glossing over many of these spots and choosing to hammer two stories pretty hard so this is the second of our two stories the famous petrified forest at ginkgo state park where is it 30 miles east of here where i-90 crosses the columbia river hotter than heck in the summertime ginkgo petrified forest just a mile off the freeway so here's a keep key diagram for us it's part of a new exhibit that will be on display at ginkgo this summer there's our ginkgo flow and at the base of the ginkgo flow we can see all of our logs tucked in with the pillows and all the logs importantly are not in the vantage sediment they're directly above the vantage sediment every log has been transported presumably before the ginkgo flow arrived on the scene here's the ginkgo flow a photo from tom foster looking north there's vantage in the bridge there's two of these great lava flows you see the scale of these lavas and you see that orange kind of weird area down in here here's where the petrified wood is located in the pillow zone of the ginkgo lava flow so many of us know these great lavas are an inland pacific northwest story it's got nothing to do with the cascades and these hawaiian-like lavas came out of cracks which are in extreme southeast washington and northeast oregon the cracks formed 16 million years ago and the mafic magma that's very fluid came to the surface here's a miniature version of what it must have looked like this is at kilauea volcano in hawaii showing a fissure sowing some mafic magma and showing not only spatter at the vent but flows flowing away in both directions from the fissure that is the story with the ginkgo flow our friend tonight but all 300 of the lava flows that flooded the inland pacific northwest there is the precise fissure for the ginkgo which i tried to draw on the green board just a second ago and there is the ginkgo lava crossing through the cascades the cascades were low at the time in places and getting to a part of the oregon coast in two different places the lavas and the logs are intricately connected in the vantage area an important concept is when we petrify those logs we completely seal them off from the surface and so if you are one log who's remembering this kind of swampy wet time whether you're a log from the okanagan or the cascades you're underground for millions of years until the ice age floods come through rip up a bunch of the bedrock and suddenly reveal a desert we went through this complete change in uh climate in the last 16 million years okay here we go ginkgo flow above vantage sediment underneath we're going to keep going back to that if you're a real junkie with geology you should be alerted to the fact that we now have a more precise dates for the great lavas and the sediments in between and all i'm showing here is that we used to have a date of 15.6 million years for those ginkgo logs it's now been changed to 16.1 who cares in general but for those of us that really study carefully there's zircons that we can pull out of the interbeds and get more precise dates okay so it's the logs of the fascinating part of this and it's the logs that were discovered first by george beck the guy who taught here in town in 1931 he is the reason for ginkgo petrified forest state park again exhibits from state parks starting to show up and we've had back and forth between the artists and the scientists to try to create watercolors that have relevance to our current understanding of those logs even though there's still a major mystery left this artist sam did a beautiful job with these things there's the ginkgo flow coming into lake vantage and dealing with these waterlogged trees stumps tree trunks that don't have roots none of them have roots none of them are in growth position jack powell with a cartoon to give us a sense of the ginkgo flow coming in now there are a few trees that look like they're in growth position and you would swear that they've been standing there for 16 million years this is a favorite of mine with his on the ridge north of the museum and it caught my eye a few years ago on postcards etc and it's still there you can hike out to it i'll send you out there it's a bit of a hike but uh it's it's glorious but the important point is that was entombed in the pillow zone of the ginkgo flow and everything's been eroded away except for that log along i-90 a couple miles east of vantage if you're thoroughly wide awake you can see some big holes along the road when they put in i-90 they took a bunch of logs out of the area and those holes if you crawl back into them have petrified logs within them and some of those logs are now for close inspection at the museum many of us know that those layers have been folded because of tectonic squeezing and not only the squeezing has made the ridges but it helped form the yakima river canyon so there's petrified wood in the yakima river canyon there's actually more than one forest horizon but we're focusing primarily on the ginkgo horizon tonight let's visit the walls of the yakima river canyon with some old footage that we never used and so it's a bit rough but i want to use it anyway we're up on one of those layers right now and all over the ground amidst all these beautiful wildflowers this petrified wood stacks of it like i'm sent to the backyard to go get some wood bring it in for the fire but this wood's got heft 15.6 million year old wood that feels like stone feels like rock instead of wood so how does this work how do we get wood to turn to stone how do we get it to petrify all right that's what i'm talking about check this out oh gorgeous this is a hole in the hillside where a petrified log was sitting for 15 and a half million years until probably the 1930s when guys came up here and put incredible effort into pulling a heavy petrified wood log out of the hill and skidded it down to the river the hole is all that's left there is some petrified wood you can see way back in there oh my god you've actually got to take a look at this you can see a part of the log i didn't know that that's cool you can see why we didn't use it there's a gentleman with us tonight from yakuma named ray feusi and ray has been a collector for a long time yeah he was going to show me the the petrified wood if i'd show him fossils so we came up to look at the wood and i happened to look down and right alongside him he was a petrified agotized acorn an acorn from 15 million years ago yes come up to the stage after the lecture tonight if you want to chat with ray about some of these things so it's more than acorns though oh yeah what else did you find in those piles one of the most beautiful is the the uh pine cone that happens to be called pinus poisii meaning that it was this is all from 16 million years ago during the time of the ginkgo flow and a little bit older in this case oh my heavens how does that even work get those seeds in there like that it's like somebody painted that on next one maybe the cross section of the cone pinus foisii all right so the person who did most of this work originally to realize the incredible variety of wood by the way how do they know what kinds of trees they were if they're just a bunch of petrified stumps is there a way to figure that out that's coming and also some details on george beck so this is what vantage looked like back in the 1930s when george beck discovered the petrified forest and finally we're talking about george himself a music professor at central and a geology professor at central 1920s george beck 1930s and 40s george beck taking students to the petroglyphs advantage before the wanapum dam was constructed george beck taking students on field trips in private cars in october of 1931 up to grand coulee before the grand coulee dam was built yet amazing stuff that's been put together recently with historical information from the archives at central and some other sources i'm about to tell you about so george beck is worth our attention tonight with all of his publications of these logs as well as his rich history with ellensburg and yakima he was also doing a lot of public outreach he had a club called the fossil woods of the far west he's actually got a little return envelope with that letterhead on it and he would send out newsletters and photographs through his microscopes and communicating to people who are really into this petrified wood business i won't overwhelm you with this but i found i've got my hands on some original documents when they started to put the ginkgo park together and i'll couple point out a couple of quick things um 1933 they were going to build the new highway that's the old vantage highway to expose the vantage forest of logs to the public in 1934 the legislature and state park commission had shown interest to put this into a park status but in that year beck gave up on the plans to become a national monument that was the original hope to have a ginkgo national monument have it be part of the national park service and not the state park service uh in 1935 the park service decided to put a ccc camp in the forest under frank fox as supervisor uh so work began to build during the depths of the depression the the museums at ginkgo park i got a kick out of this because beck is saying look this area is rather bleak very hot in the summer we're talking about vantage now very cold in the winter likely to be windy at all times there's almost no trees the major feature of the park is of course the petrified logs but these all look pretty much alike to the average visitor unless the weather is unusually good there will be little incentive for visitors to spend much time outdoors a good museum is likely to become the most important feature of the park and it's the museum itself that's going to help educate the significance of the logs yeah it's bleak man this is last summer after the big fire that went through but even without fire it's not the most hospitable of conditions most times of the year the main museum the trailside museum and the ccc boys bake back-breaking work to put those structures together the museum is still there from those days in the 1930s and it's heavily visited by travelers across the state and there's still a park ranger there who's chatting about all these logs and doing all this material some of the exhibits are probably from the 30s i must say that's maybe not right to say but they could use a little dusting off on occasion oh good lord i am at gingko state park got petrified logs laying on the ground here for visitors to enjoy it's petrified these are logs made out of stone they were pulled right out of basalt lava in the hills logs right in the lava why didn't the logs just burn up from the heat of the lava they survived because there was water present the logs were pulled out of the pillow zone at the base of a lava flow which tells us that water dominated this landscape the lake water protected the logs from the heat of the lava and there was so much lava that we sealed off those logs from the atmosphere so we didn't rot the logs with oxygen we had the right ingredients then for petrification a lot of water a lot of heat and minerals okay we got it if we go to the trailside museum the grand opening back in the 30s and the early 40s and you can go there you can take these trails but uh i understand you got to protect the logs they don't get pilfered but maybe we can do a little better than this this is uh kind of a tough sell for some uh the caretaker's cabin right next to the museum and this is the place that's going to have the new exhibits for the first time in decades they're going to have those new exhibits i've been sharing with you in the trailside museum which has been boarded up for years looking forward to that right here looking forward to that in the next month or two hopefully trail to the petrified logs and again these exhibits by the artwork to try to reconstruct those conditions in vantage which is very difficult to try to figure out exactly what it looked like when the lavas came in we're in the home stretch now beck is talking about the okanagan being the source of the logs and having the lavas come in after those logs come down from the okanagan and come down the columbia by the way no talk of the ice age this is in the 1930s this is before it's accepted that we had ice age floods coming from montana and this is bec talking about these trees that have to have come from different elevations and that's why he was promoting the okanagan as a source we know about those logs and how varied they are new ideas involving lahars is it is this another way to bring all these logs into lake vantage can we do the same thing and collect logs from different elevations here's some footage of an actual volcanic mud flow i think it might be actually saint helens in 1980 in the tutel river and here we go this looks promising but it's difficult to pinpoint for sure that is the story with the logs at ginkgo there are no lahar deposits mixed in with the logs and that's a fatal problem with this story even if the vantage member is a lahar story why aren't there logs in the vantage sediment itself the vantage sediment is not only at ginkgo it's uh just north uh excuse me just south of ellensburg up on monashtash ridge through vanderbilt gap last summer i picked just the right night to get good light do you know that spot can you picture this we're on the east wall right past the rest areas at the summit of monashtash ridge and can you see the repetitive little flood type deposits that are in there the 15 mini layers within the vantage this is the ginkgo flow on the left and an older flow on the right if we restore those at least with my camera to their original horizontal position can we look in detail at those layers and convince ourselves it's an okanagan story instead of a cascade story we cannot with our current understanding and these layers continue to be looked at by the way if you feel like risking it stop at the rest area on the northbound side of i-82 at monash tash scramble up this which is very difficult and jack powell and i did this last summer and there are some petrified logs up there wonderful tad dilhoff has put really the best resource available in my opinion it's a beautiful glossy little book called middle miocene wood floor of the vantage washington usa it's a few years old but really well worth your efforts to get it on amazon perhaps and tad has continued to help us identify woods understand and try to promote new work with these petrified wood samples to eventually solve the mystery of the source okanagan cascades both or neither we finished tonight with our friend george beck and paying particular attention to him up at the blue lake rhino where he was actually helping to promote that rhinoceros mold that was found near dry falls also from this myosin time and beck continued into the 1950s and after his retirement at cwu was honored with a celebration and artist professor sarah spurgeon created this big colorful mural of george and the ginkgo leaves and that mural is still in randall hall at central's campus that's my mother we're almost done in my office i've had this photocopied version of george beck's journal not the original book one of his journal and it's all i had and it's all the burke museum had and tad dilhoff this fellow i've mentioned a lot has really wanted to get the original journals from george beck but how is that going to be possible they have all of beck's materials now at the burke in seattle all his little petrified wood chips all of his hand-written work it's in the right place those are the folks doing the paleo botany research and then i got tipped off that there's a relative of george beck still with us in yakima you say go down to 40th avenue in yakima you know where the fred meyer is yeah well right behind fred meyer there's a saddle shop the mighty stitch saddle and tack repair so i called ahead of time explained who i was the guy said sure come down i'll chat with you it's george beck's grandson and i visited the first time and chatted a little bit about his grandfather george beck and came back the next time and developed a little bit more trust with george mitchell as his last name he's also named george so george beck we're talking about tonight but george mitchell the grandson runs this shadow shop and i kept visiting every few weeks and the visits got a little longer and a little longer and before long i got invited back in the back private work area with the shop and the next visit well we got i got a few things that george had you know and i i'm the last of the family nobody else is really interested in this would you like a few uh of some of the the original documents for george and i'm like yes that's wonderful thank you and then i went back again and there was another surprise for me tonight we turned our eyes to the future conjectured a world of peace or totally destroyed by the weapons of another war george had found some 78 records which were radio interviews that george beck did with the seattle radio program back in the 40s and so those have been given to our department at central uh wherever these preserved plants and animals are found they are surrounded by pillowy masses of lava a lot as you know when spread upon dry ground cracks into upright columns but when ushered into water breaks up into men so that's george beck's voice and i will leave you with this my last visit george mitchell was going to come was going to come tonight but he couldn't make it but he's going to come next week so if you want to talk or have any stories about george beck come next week and you can visit with him up on stage after the lecture next week but my last visit last fall with george mitchell the grandson he said uh okay i i've got all these original journals and i know the burke museum has wanted to look at this but we just weren't ready to to part with them but you've got this connection with this guy dilhoff over at the burke so here you go what you want to do with them is is up to you so all these wonderful original one-of-a-kind journals from all that work all those original discoveries and observations by george beck in the 1930s are now with the collection and all the petrified wood with george beck and his materials so we salute you george beck with all of your history we salute the ginkgo petrified forest we salute the palm fronds up at blewett pass and i salute you for coming this evening thank you very much [Applause] thank you everybody we'll see you next week thank you much

Channel: Nick Zentner

Views: 34,416

Keywords: Nick Zentner, Plant Fossils, Central Washington University, PETM, MMCO

Id: KlweQfEsKNc

Length: 73min 17sec (4397 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020