An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change [View all]

In the clammy depths of a southern Illinois coal mine lies the largest fossil forest ever discovered, at least 50 times as extensive as the previous contender.

Scientists are exploring dripping passages by the light of headlamps, mapping out an ecosystem from 307 million years ago, just before the world’s first great forests were wiped out by global warming. This vast prehistoric landscape may shed new light on climate change today.

Dating from the Pennsylvanian period of the Carboniferous era, the forest lies entombed in a series of eight active mines. They burrow through the rich seams of the Springfield Coal, a nationally important energy resource that underlies much of Illinois and two neighboring states and has been heavily mined for decades.

Pushed downward over the ages by the crushing weight of rock layers higher up, the Springfield forest lies at varying depths, 250 to 800 feet underground. The researchers have only sampled it so far, in the vicinity of Galatia, Illinois, but they think it extends more than 100 miles in one direction; its width has not been ascertained. An earlier discovery by the same team, the Herrin Coal forest farther north in Illinois, is just two miles long.

“Effectively you’ve got a lost world,” said Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has explored the site. “It’s the closest thing you’ll find to time travel,” he added.

Curiously, the forest can be viewed only from below. The scientists crane their necks, illuminating the ceiling with miners’ helmet lamps. Hundreds of millions of years ago, trees and other plants grew atop thick peat that eventually compressed into coal; when that was excavated, the forest’s fossilized remains could be seen in the mine’s shale ceiling.

“It’s a botanical Pompeii, buried in a geological instant,” said William A. DiMichele, a paleobiologist and curator of fossil plants at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and one of the forest’s discoverers. He believes it was gently entombed by floods that successively washed through a swamp.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/underground-fossil-forest-in-illinois-offers-clues-on-climate-change.html?


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