The Underwater Forest

fifteen miles from the nearest land 60 feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico lies a relic of eons past but it's not a shipwreck or anything made by humans this is much older from a time long before man even dreamt of sailing ships across the sea here just off the coast of Alabama lies an ancient forest of giant trees covered in dense carpets of seein enemies and swarming with schools of fish this strange underwater world is unlike anything ever seen before for here 10 fathoms down stand the stumps of thousands of trees still rooted in the mud they grew in 50,000 years before Egypt's great pyramids were built you can even trace the path of an ancient river that once wove through this forest when it was dry land following the river as it meanders through the forest you weave among trees covered in sponges and crabs instead of squirrels and birds scientists are just beginning to understand what the forest tells us about our past and what clues it may hold for our future in an era of rising sea levels unmistakeable two eyes that have seen the swamps that ring the Gulf Coast and the American South the trees are Cypress native of southern freshwater swamps obvious from the craggy outline of the trunk that is the hallmark of the species another telltale sign is the ring of distinctive knees that surround each trunk the knees are believed to help the trees stay upright in the soupy mud at the bottom of the great swamps unbelievably it appears the knees have been performing the same function buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico for millennia but how did they get here most of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico looks like a barren sandy desert home to starfish and jellyfish but not the forest if Strong's would life like a coral reef why are these trees here in this one spot and nowhere else and how did they get discovered so far offshore in the vast sea our story begins with Hurricane Ivan one of the largest storms to hit the Gulf of Mexico in a century a class for Hurricane Ivan brought crushing waves and 140 mile per hour winds massive all rigs were washed ashore and condominiums on the beach were crumbled the storm's path brought it right up the Gulf of Mexico to the Alabama coastline a series of government data buoys far offshore recorded ninety eight foot tall waves the largest ever measured before the breweries were ripped loose from their moorings tracing eivin's passed from the buoys to where he made landfall and you can see the center of the storm passed directly over the spot where dive shop owner Chaz Broughton discovered the forest so yeah we got a phone call about a spot producing fish that they wouldn't have what enough tremendous amount of showed and wasn't on any of the charts asked us we can might check it out and enroll it off the boat the first day and got down there and there's just this it would look like a prehistoric riverbed just running along the sand there with trees just coming out of it out over the like a stream would trees coming out of a stream and right then you knew you had something just totally different than what you've ever seen in the Gulf of 25 years of diving so it was quite a quite magnificent after discovering the forest Broughton's first move was to bring environmental journalist Ben Raines to the site I remember the first time Chad took me out to the underwater forest it just blew my mind it looked like someone had taken a modern-day Cypress parse like like where we are right now and plopped it down on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico you could see the big swelling bottoms of the cypress trees you could see the knees you could see the limbs you can see tree trunks laying on the bottom they were still bark on the trees it was it was absolutely extraordinary you know it's like a coral reef every stump is just covered in anemones there octopus all over all kinds of fish each stump has its own little boat Gregory this little blue and yellow beautiful little fish that guards it is real territorial about it their flame cardinalfish out there which is normally a nocturnal fish you usually see in caves and things and they're living in the little nooks and crannies of the stumps eels you know all kinds of strange crabs and things then the big predator fish will come swooping in it's just a really really extraordinary environment sea turtles everywhere we came up from the first dive the first thing I said was we've got to get some scientists out here I did news articles they just went viral on the internet we were instantly getting emails and calls from Japan from China people all over the world wanted to see this thing we also started getting calls from Salvage companies these were companies that wanted to mine the logs from the bottom they actually want to pull them up and make things out of coffee tables electric guitars you know a fifty thousand year old coffee table for instance they started offering us quite a lot of money for the coordinates so we took it upon ourselves to protect the site we haven't given the number to anyone and we're working through the process to have it declared a National Marine Sanctuary which looks like it's going to go through it's going very well the other thing we did was start bringing scientists out there lots and lots of scientists rain's important turn to a handful of scientists and invited them to explore the site and tell them what they could about how trees came to be rooted in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico one of the first was Martin Becker at paleontologist Becker specializes in ancient sharpteeth and other marine fossils which he usually finds on land he was instantly fascinated and began digging and prodding around on the site almost immediately he attracted some unwanted attention a sandbar shark small but quite aggressive charged both marty and our camera crew he was to be the first of many sharks encountered at the ancient site fighting the small Sheepshead visitor eased away crunching his prey with razor like teeth Becker undaunted went right back to work that goal guy was so cool hahahahaha awesome absolutely or Aegis everyone man in the Gulf of Mexico it's just terrific it takes a while to take it all in for sure second to understand how the forest came to be where it is it would probably help to understand a little bit about his work which documents massive changes in level the place we are collecting it is really very very exciting because we're about a hundred miles from the nearest shoreline and we're pulling out fossilized shark's teeth from this modern Creek and certainly don't see any sharks swimming around behind you no more than half the state of Alabama at one time was submerged underneath an ancestral ocean that dates back to the age of the dinosaurs and the record of that actually is recorded in the fossils and in the regional geology like where we're sitting right now in this beautiful modern creaking with waterfalls and we're sitting around looking also out of forests you know so you're you're looking at something on the order from the ancient forests that submerged far as to where we're sitting at about a hundred and twenty-five miles of distance and you know the water in that area is about 60 feet deep so you know we're talking about a substantial amount of sea level change so at one time that area obviously was like a modern Cypress forest is today and sea level has subsequently risen it's on its way up now and it's going to return to this area that we're sitting in and when it returns so will the sharks it's just going to be a while sea levels rise and fall in connection with the ice ages the earth experiences every 40 to 100 thousand years during warm periods such as the earth experienced around the time of the dinosaurs 100 million years ago huge portions of the United States were covered by a vast and ancient sea which explains the shark's teeth fan by Marty's crew during the cool periods sea levels fall because much of the water on earth ends up frozen in glaciers in the last ice age 12 to 18 thousand years ago sea levels were 400 feet lower and the gulf shoreline was about 30 miles farther offshore than it is today but scientists think that the forest is much older than that dating to another Ice Age more than 50 thousand years ago Christine DeLong is a paleoclimatologist she usually works with corals studying the ancient climate by drilling out core samples all right she couldn't turn down the chance to work with the Cypress so today we're hoping to go down and take a couple pours with our increment bores we typically use these on lands with live trees so doing this underwater with dead trees is going to be an experiment to see if it works typically we don't core use increment bores on dead trees so it'll be interesting to see if we are able to actually take a core and bring it up and everything in one piece then we're hoping to see the bands in the the bald cypress and looking at those bands it'll tell us one what type of environment it was growing in so if it was more like a river with water flowing through or if it was more steel with peat from the climate perspective if we have a river flowing through this should give us a nice climate reconstruction versus a peat-based bottom the trees are really happy and they don't bury their growth year to year so it doesn't tell us a whole lot about climate so so we're hoping to see one can we get cores so these trees have been exposed now about nine years to the marine environment and typically with wood it disintegrates quickly but because these are Cypress they're holding up a lot longer than they normally would so it'll be interesting to see so I'm excited okay very good okay [Music] we first came down off the acre line there was like a Cypress so but almost like it had been cut off and you can see the buttress features and everything around it but it was really low profile to the bottom and there's like a Ledge running along the side and at first glance it look like sediment layers but they want to win over started touching it it's wood there's like layers and layers of wood so these trees have been exposed now about nine years to the marine environment and typically with wood is disintegrates quickly but because these are cypress they're holding up a lot longer than they normally would Kristine drills the coring machine into the stump by hand the goal is to get a clean sample of wood from the heart of the tree beyond the outer surface which has been damaged by marine worms that bore into the water these interior pieces will be used to figure out how old the trees are using a method known as radiocarbon dating Kristine also wants to collect as much wood as possible that is still buried in the sediment on the sea floor where it is more protected from decomposition the silty mud at the site is proof that this part of the Gulf has a very different history from most areas the river mud here rises in big clouds whenever it is disturbed that mud is also the reason why the trees have remained intact through the millennia buried beneath a thick layer of mud no oxygen could get to them and underwater no oxygen means no decomposition the trees are brought up to grant Holly a dendrochronologist or tree scientist specializing in bald cypress not a scuba diver he relied on Broughton's team to bring him samples to examine [Laughter] Wow see you sinner treat right here in this region at our bar Gary here and this better or worse than you had expected it's better much better than I expected yeah it's very in fact you know oh my goodness still got bark on it that's awesome bark on me yeah and here's a that's a gallery from a beetle probably a beetle or some kind of insect right that was burnt burn it burrowing into the bark and near you the gallery right there Wow you can tell like this is probably a trunk of a tree which is great I want to see here the gross things look really narrow very tight gross with an indication that these trees were stressed by something in the environment little over here exactly that's what you want to see you I don't to see big fat rings yeah they're really really tight narrow rings yeah you can see the Rings actually a migraine right there so this is looking through the tree a tree you can actually see all the little operations right there very tight rims it's really really good that's definitely a tree trunk not a root for branch I'm excited by the condition of the would grant persuades the dive team to try and bring up a large stump it's a dangerous proposition as the stump must be raised using nothing more than bags of a inflated from dive tanks once rigged the stump floats gently off the bottom the divers have to carefully control the amount of lift by adjusting the amount of air in the bags much like a hot-air balloon pilot controls his altitude by a dingle releasing he bent to much air and the stump begins to sink if anything goes wrong the stump could drop suddenly pulling an unsuspecting diver to the depths or more dangerous overinflated bags could cause the stump to rise rapidly possibly leaving the dive team with a life-threatening case of the bends we have a surface the mammoth-sized of the stump becomes apparent huge breath as does the fact that the crew is going to have a very difficult time trying to pull the stump from the sea today attached lions can escape and prepare to hoist it aboard to God but it's no use it's too big so they settle her next best thing sawing off chunks for grant it's his first chance to touch a full-size stump he's quickly in the water mask and snorkel the pieces are brought in and the dive crew decides to return the stump to exactly the same spot they pulled it up from then the team calls in a day returning with the first ever samples pulled from the ancient site it really drives home the fact that sea levels change so they change over time and that where we're at right now used to be a big cypress for us so it's pretty cool back on land grant is a professor in the forestry department at the University of Southern Mississippi the samples ended up in his laboratory there where they were carefully dried and prepared for examination yeah the opportunity to really study the site to kind of reveal clues of what the climate was like in the Gulf Coast region is very rare now there are very few natural archives of long-term climate change here in the Gulf Coast regions so had this site uncovered by a hurricane of enormous stumps were still rooted in the sediments sediments that they were sort of covered up with it is a very rare and unique opportunity when we ran this Kazan saw you can smell the resin just like you were cutting into a fresh piece of wood today we same things happen when we stand them down and it smelled fresh very well preserved you know given the back of these samples are you know thousands of years old I was astonished one of the most surprising discoveries was the Seth that leaked out of the wood when it was cut sap that had to be tens of thousands of years old given the fact that the growth rooms are still visible wood fibers are still visible it was very surprising as soon as it began looking under the microscope grant could tell these trees grew in a very different world from the one we know today interesting thing about about these rings each cell is around the same size which is not like Bald Cypress today usually usually the cells will change in size a syllable gets very much much smaller which gives it a darker appearance but all of these cells are relatively the same size indicates something different in the environment or climatically than today the growth rings are much much more narrow in the underwater-forest samples and we are in Bald Cypress today either sort of indicates that it was a lot drier at the time or Brad if the trees at that time we're responding water temperature then it means that temperature was a little bit cooler doing this now one of the things we've been working on is trying to figure out how old the trees are and first just based on water depth and looking at the sea level curves we thought the trees should be in the 10,000 to 12,000 range but we took some wood samples since I'm off to get radiocarbon dated and surprising results they were not able to date them because the trees are so old that we can't use radiocarbon methods to do the dating so what we went out with the coastal profiler from LSU and we collected some sediment cores and in those sediment cores right above the level where the wood is we had some other pieces of wood so we collected those pieces of wood set those off to get radiocarbon dated and those dates came back about 42,000 years old and we have a second date that we got back that was 45,000 years old so this tells us that we're in the ballpark of between 50 to about 60,000 years ago for the actual wood pieces but we're still not had we still don't have a solid date so we'd like to have a scientist so forty to forty-five thousand years ago sea level is not stable it's increasing and decreasing increasing and decreasing and some of this is you know tens of meters and just a thousand years we're in this period called marine isotope stage three and this is where we're going into full glacial conditions but it's not fully glaciated yet it's colder it's windier and one of the things paleoclimatologists want to understand about this period is what was happening to different ecosystems how was a bald cypress swamp responding to these changes in sea level and it getting colder and so far it looks like all the trees experience some stress events so something happened to all of them where their growth decreased really rapidly and then I had a rapid increase and then the growth decreases really rapidly again and it looks like all the trees died about the same time Christine brought in a team of marine geologists with sophisticated sonar to see if clues to what killed the trees might be buried in the sand surrounding the forest it's actually lies in a deep hole they found hundreds more trees at the site buried under nine feet of sand and mud so that's what's really exciting about this work that we're doing is we we have this forest that's buried and we can go out and see the forest when we dive we can map it with our geophysical and we could see how big this forest is how what the diameter of the trees were from those diameters we can start to look at their ages how healthy they were how big they were so tells us a lot about that ecosystem and everything's in place that was the ecosystem has just been buried and preserved through time back in the Abbe Christine's crew analyzed the sediment cause looking for charcoal from forest fires an ancient pollen that might have been entombed with the trees when they were buried so these are some pictures of the pollen from our Bald Cypress site in the Gulf of Mexico and this is a picture of a bald cypress pollen grains these are grass pollens and then also Tupelo which is another type of tree that exists on the Gulf Coast today so being able to look at an ecosystem that's 40 to 50 thousand years ago can tell us a lot about what was happening with climate and with sea-level rise very rapid sea level rise for different types of ecosystems and taking that type of response will help inform us about what possibly could happen in the future as we experience sea level rise and as our coastlines change particularly here on the Gulf Coast we have you no problems with subsidence we're losing our coastlines we're losing our saltwater marshes so how what will happen to these ecosystems as the sea starts to encroach in one for Christine Marti and the other scientists studying this ancient forest is really about understanding the future of our planet but if we're nine force miles or so offshore right now pretty rapid change geologically speaking of 60 feet at sea water and I mean I'm looking at a pretty substantial shoreline of development of high-rises of people Shore homes condominiums etc or so on now it's predicting the future maybe maybe an unpleasant one so you know it may happen in five years it may happen and then it may not happen in my lifetime but it's certainly going to happen scientific work in the ancient site is just beginning and the scientists can only speculate what discoveries await from clues about how quickly the Seas rose dozens of millenia ago to information about the plants and animals that called this forest home in the coming years and mysteries are unwrapped lessons learned for this distant and watery past may prove crucial to choices we make in our own ever-changing world [Music] Oh [Music]

Channel: This Is Alabama

Views: 1,115,023

Keywords: underwater forest, ancient trees, gulf shores, alabama, gulf coast, scientists, research, ancient forest

Id: PKm0eRfFFfo

Length: 27min 28sec (1648 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/randommnguy]

I hope the region is protected now because they seem to point out its location a lot.

Super cool video though!

[u/[deleted]]

Neato. Watched the whole 27 minutes without skipping once.