Canaries? We Don’t Need No Stinking Canaries.
We have an entire rainforest. A coal mine in Illinois is the unlikely home of a complete rainforest. And not just any rainforest. This one is 300 million years old .
Miners in Illinois are used to seeing a few plant fossils strewn along a mine’s ceiling, but as they burrowed farther into this one, the sheer density and area covered by such fossils struck them as phenomenal, Elrick said.
That’s when they called paleobotanist Howard Falcon-Lang from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and William DiMichele, a curator of fossil plants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
"It was an amazing experience. We drove down the mine in an armored vehicle, until we were a hundred meters below the surface,” Falcon-Lang said. “The fossil forest was rooted on top of the coal seam, so where the coal had been mined away the fossilized forest was visible in the ceiling of the mine.”
Forest snapshotHere’s what the miners and other scientists saw underground: Relatively narrow passageways wind through the “cave,” marked off with stout 100-foot-wide pillars to ensure the roof doesn’t collapse.
“It’s like in some bizarre Roman temple with tons of Corinthian pillars that are 100 feet across and only six feet tall,” Elrick told LiveScience. “As you’re walking down these passageways you see these pillars of coal on either side of you and above you—imagine an artist’s canvas painted a flat grey and that is sort of what the grey shale above the coal looks like.”
The largest ever found, the fossil forest covers an area of about 40 square miles, or nearly the size of San Francisco. This ancient assemblage of flora is thought to be one of the first rainforests on Earth, emerging during the Upper Carboniferous, or Pennsylvanian, time period that extended from about 310 million to 290 million years ago.
A reconstruction of the ancient forest showed that like today’s rainforests, it had a layered structure with a mix of plants now extinct: Abundant club mosses stood more than 130-feet high, towering over a sub-canopy of tree ferns and an assortment of shrubs and tree-sized horsetails that looked like giant asparagus.
Flash freeze
The scientists think a major earthquake about 300 million years ago caused the region to drop below sea level where it was buried in mud. They estimate that within a period of months the forest was buried, preserving it “forever.”
Unfortunately, the journal article is not available online. Nor is the mine identified, so I can't give a link to any good pictures of all this. (That's a hint to the folks at the Geology journal.) If anyone has any links to photos, list them in the comments, please.
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Blue Crab Boulevard » Cave Of Wonders — May 6, 2007 @ 8:16 am
By skh.pcola, April 23, 2007 @ 10:03 pm
“We drove down the mine in an armored vehicle…”
Erm. Why? Did they suspect that they would run into a triceratops or T. Rex? The suspense and drama is almost palpable in this sensational retelling of the event.
[/snark]