Science: Unearthing a Frozen Forest

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Basinger found that the forest was indeed dense: the stumps are only about ten paces apart, and some are as much as six feet across. "Along the edge of the hill and up on the crest," he says, "are dozens, maybe hundreds of stumps." Basinger also made "an incredible find" -- up to 19 distinct layers of stumps. "Each layer is a forest that developed, lived for many centuries and was overtaken by floods of sediments that killed the roots," he says. "They must have been killed off relatively quickly for the roots not to decay, and buried deeply enough to exclude oxygen but not so deeply as to turn them into coal. That process repeated and repeated itself over several hundreds of thousands of years."

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 the excess carbon dioxide, like the windows of a greenhouse, trapped the heat of sunlight.

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 mad."

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."

But, 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 now."