Fossilized 400-Million-Year-Old Forest Unearthed In Arctic Norway

Prof. Marshall, from the University of Southampton’s National Oceanography Centre, accurately dated the forests to 380 million years ago. The forest was discovered by a team of United Kingdom researchers and was linked to a 15 fold drop in carbon dioxide levels during the latter part of a period known as the Devonian period.

A tropical forest in the Arctic consisted once of densely packed 12-foot-tall trees with flared trunks and curved branches of needle leaves. The Devonian period lasted from 416 million years ago to 358 years ago. According to the researchers these early equatorial forests are likely to have provided a great contribution to the reduction of the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, especially because of the high temperatures and large rainfall amounts usually recorded in the area.

“These fossil forests shows us what the vegetation and landscape were like on the equator 380 million years ago, as the first trees were beginning to appear on the Earth”, researcher Chris Berry, a professor of earth sciences at Cardiff University, said in a press release.

Around that time, Svalbard was located on the equator, before the tectonic plate shifted north by about 80° to its position today in the Arctic Ocean. This type of tree grew to a maximum height of 13 feet and they would have grown very close together. Berry had previously studied an older forest that was found in NY.

“This high-tree-density tropical vegetation may have promoted rapid weathering of soils, and hence enhanced carbon dioxide drawdown, when compared with other contemporary and more high-latitude forests”. This would indicate that these first tall trees growing only roughly 8 inches apart from one another in dense forests have contributed significantly to the reduction of the carbon dioxide concentration found in the atmosphere, since they used photosynthesis to extract the CO2 from the air.

Berry had also worked on the identification of another ancient forest found in Gilboa, New York, which would have been south of the equator at the time.

“The plants were absorbing carbon dioxide through photosynthesis to build their tissues, and also through the process of forming soils”, Dr. Barry said.

The researchers delved on the geographical diversity of the ecology and forest plants soon after their evolution, to which he attributed the dramatic decreased in Carbon dioxide levels.

Today freezing-cold Svalbard is among the most northernmost areas inhabited by man, home to about 2,500 and the so-called “Global Seed Vault”, an underground frozen seed bank containing a wide range of seeds for when a mass-scale crisis of diversity loss hits the planet.