Word: mcmillans
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Despite their great age, the stumps, logs and leaves are astonishingly 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...
First to spot the fossil forest was Paul Tudge, a helicopter pilot who has been ferrying Geological Survey scientists to and from remote sites on Axel Heiberg and Ellesmere for years. He had once seen McMillan's fossil forest, and on a flight to Axel Heiberg in July 1985, Tudge recalls, "I saw the same sort of stumps, but many, many of them." He later returned to the site, landed nearby, collected samples and brought them to Basinger, who immediately began planning this summer's expedition. Aided by a grant from the Geological Survey and accompanied by another fossil-forest...
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...
Discovery of the fossil forest may have an economic spin-off. When resins given off by these ancient trees are buried 6,000 ft. underground, according to McMillan, they are eventually converted into very good oil. The resins, he believes, are the major source of oil found in the Beaufort Sea and elsewhere in the Arctic. "The more we know of the climate and vegetation," he says, "the better we'll be able to assess the oil and gas potential there...
...like Basinger, McMillan is most intrigued by the scientific potential. "There's going to be a generation of work done now in this area," he explains. "When you have so many stumps, when you can see what the forest floor was like, when you have the soil of that time, when you know the angle of the sun giving the months of dark, you have a heck of a lot of facts to work on. We're going to have our fling...