Word: arctics
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...around, and you're in a desert. The only trees are dwarf willows one and two inches high." The sparse growth surrounding the half square mile of fallen trees is not surprising: the location is Axel Heiberg Island, less than 700 miles from the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic, an arid, frigid region hardly conducive to the growth of any vegetation, let alone large trees. Then how did a forest thrive? The answer, says Basinger, is that the stumps and logs are 45 million years old, remnants of trees that grew when Axel Heiberg Island -- and the world...
...well preserved. "This fossil forest is not petrified, turned to stone by minerals entering and replacing the wood cell structure," says Neil McMillan, of the Geological Survey of Canada, who discovered a similar but much smaller site 30 years ago on nearby Ellesmere Island. Instead, shallow burial in the Arctic soil has left the forest in a mummified state. As a result, says Basinger, "you can saw the wood. You can burn it." Indeed, during an expedition to the site in July, he actually brewed a pot of tea over burning fossil debris...
While continental drift has been relocating other land masses over the past 45 million years, Axel Heiberg Island has remained relatively stationary in its Arctic home. The fact that lush forests could have grown so far north indicates that the climate there was once far more hospitable. In fact, scientists have long known that during the early part of the Tertiary period, which began about 65 million years ago, the entire planet was warmer, probably due to carbon dioxide that spewed into the atmosphere during movements of the earth's crust. The result was a greenhouse effect, in which...
During that period, the Arctic climate resembled that of Northern California today, with one exception: that far north, the sun never sets in summer and never rises in winter. "How did the trees grow so lushly in five months a year of blackness, without photosynthesis?" McMillan wonders. Francis, now back in Australia with samples of wood, leaves and soil from the island, suggests one possibility: "It may be that they shed their leaves and just stood dormant until it became light again, and then grew like...
...remains very much the Southerner. Yet his patchwork-quilt collection of pieces covers every section of the nation. Among the subjects that have piqued his interest are the loon preservationists in New Hampshire, a restaurant in Barrow, Alaska, that is the only place to find Mexican food in the Arctic Circle, and an entrepreneur in Des Moines who sells live bait through vending machines...