Scientists in northwest Wyoming found remnants of an ancient forest, frozen in ice on a barren tundra in northwest Wyoming.
Uncovering the rest of the story is a race against time.
The ghostly fallen trees and stumps were revealed in a melting ice patch in the Bearfoot Plateau, an area that contains some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth and is known for rugged mountains, glaciers and vast treeless tundra.
"We dated those trees and found out they were established sometime between five and six thousand years ago," David McWethy, an associate professor in earth sciences at Montana State University, said in an interview Wednesday. “And so this was kind of a big striking moment where we're saying, hey, there's a mature forest growing here 5,000 years ago, where there are no trees today,"
The site is nearly 700 feet above the current tree line.
The find was detailed in a paper published Dec. 30 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The remains of an ancient forest emerge from a melting ice patch at Beartooth Plateau in Wyoming.
(Daniel Stahle)
McWethy said tree ring records from the area indicate they grew during a warm period in Earth's climate.
"So that allowed these trees to move up slope," he said. "It allowed a really large mature forest to grow, and we think that a lot more of these forests were all over the plateau during that time period."
Research has shown the warm period ended in abrupt cooling connected to volcanic activity in Iceland. That left the dead trees encapsulated in ice.
The research on the ice patch was prompted by an earlier discovery of 10,000-year-old tools and other relics that indicated a human presence.
There could be other frozen secrets in the area, that like this one could help shed light on the past and the future.
"We really need to make a strong effort right now to look at these ice patches," McWethy said. "Because things are rapidly melting out of them, and once those organic materials hit daylight they degrade within years, or even within a year."
Science shows the fast rate of melting is fueled by human-caused climate change that's making Earth warmer.
"We just have a few years to try to look at these archives and learn what we can from them before they're gone," McWethy said.
Weather.com staff writer Jan Childs covers breaking news and features related to weather, space, climate change, the environment and everything in between.
