The sea is full of mystery

From Scientists Unearth an Ancient Lost Forest ‘Entombed’ Off Alabama's Coast by Becky Ferreira.

The scene is like something out of a dreamscape: schools of fish swimming through a forest of gnarled, thick-trunked cypress trees that were seeded some 60,000 years ago. But this surreal underwater woodland is a very real place off the coast of Alabama, and scientists think its preserved trees may contain secrets about fighting infections and other ailments.

This cypress forest thrived on land at around the same time that prehistoric humans began migrating out of Africa. As individual trees died and fell to the forest floor, some of them became “entombed” in peat and sediment, according to NOAA. When the Ice Age ended, sea levels rose and these woody time capsules were engulfed by the ocean and buried again, this time under the seabed.

The ancient forest was finally exhumed from its seafloor grave by Hurricane Ivan, which hit the Gulf Coast in 2004 and exposed an arboreal seascape that now lies sixty feet underwater. The precise location of the unique forest has remained a guarded secret, for the most part, though scientists and filmmakers have paid it a few visits.

However, this one site may be “the tip of the iceberg” that hints at a far more expansive preservation of ancient underwater forests, according to Margo Haygood, a molecular biologist at the University of Utah.

“There could be much more underneath [this site] and there could also be other forests in other parts of the Gulf,” Haygood said in a call. “People stumbled upon this one site but there’s likely to be more of them and they could be looked for systematically.”