“Sixty feet beneath the waters off the Gulf coast of Alabama lies a forest of cypress stumps more than 50,000 years old,” says Living on Earth. “Fish hide among the roots of the trees.”
Hello from Hurricane Central. The guy in charge of New Shoreham’s power company says to expect that Henri will cause a loss of electricity, so if I break my perfect 10-year-plus record of daily blogging, you’ll know why.
Meanwhile, let’s think about scuba diving in an ancient, submerged forest in the Gulf of Mexico.
Living on Earth host Steve Curwood interviewed Ben Raines in 2012 about this and reposted the story and video because of new urgency to get the area classified as a marine sanctuary before it’s exploited.
“STEVE CURWOOD: Deep beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, off the Alabama coast, lie ancient cypress trees that only a handful of people have ever seen. One of those lucky few is Ben Raines, director of the [South Alabama Land Trust].
“BEN RAINES: For many years I was the environment reporter for the paper down here, the Press-Register, and so I had a buddy who owned a scuba diving shop, and he used to taunt me with this tale of an underwater forest that he had been diving on one time, and I pestered him for years and years and years, and he finally agreed to take me out there.
“He heard about it from a fisherman who just noticed a ledge on his bottom machine as he was riding across the gulf. So he started fishing there and catching a lot of Red Snapper. And he gave the numbers, the GPS coordinates, to my buddy that owns the dive shop and asked him to go out there and see what it was. He hit the bottom and said there’s a bunch of trees.
“CURWOOD: Now how deep is deep for an underwater forest?
“RAINES: Well, this is about 60 feet. Of course, all over the Earth, we know sea levels have gone down hundreds of feet. So we have a delta, a river delta here. Further up in the delta, about 80 miles inland, there’s sand dollars all over in these limestone bluffs. So we know sea level was that high at one time. Now we’ve got these trees 60 feet underwater, so sea level was that low, and it’s just a fascinating push and pull of the ocean through the climatic change over the eons.
“CURWOOD: So when did you finally get to visit the forest?
“RAINES: I got out there a year ago last August. …
The way we dive here, we’ll drop the anchor over whatever the GPS number is. And then we swim down the anchor line to get to the spot because the water’s a little murky — otherwise you get lost.
“I went down the anchor line, and when I hit the bottom, there it was. The first stump. And it was about as big around as a garbage can lid, but it had that very distinctive irregular shape that a Cypress trunk has. … Then it was surrounded by ‘knees.’ You know, Cypress trees have knees — you see them in the swamps — that stick up out of the water to kind of help hold them in place, and here was a Cypress tree on the bottom of the ocean. And I swam a few feet, and there was another one, and a few feet more, another one, and I quickly realized they were all around me in every direction. …
“It’s totally enchanting. You know, these trees are covered in anemones and crabs and shrimp — and then you have these huge clouds of Red Snapper and Grouper following you around. I was down there one day swimming along the ledge where the biggest stumps are, and I turned around and there was this huge funnel shape of fish behind me, I mean it must have been 200 Snapper, and they were just following me around. When I stopped, they would stop. When I turned around, they all fell in behind me. …
“[Groupers] come right up to you. And some of the fish that are down there, the trigger fish, will actually come up and chew on your camera. You have to shoo them away. They just seem to have no fear. …
“From the moment I hit the bottom and saw the stumps, it was just exhilarating. You knew you were in this sort of ‘land of the lost,’ this place that shouldn’t exist, but here it was, and I got the camera out, I hit the record button, and I never turned it off, and that’s exactly what I’ve done every dive I’ve made down there. And now I’ve been going down there with three cameras, you know, setting them up in different locations just to kind of capture this place while it’s there, because if we get a storm, it could theoretically come into the Gulf and change everything out there and bury this place up again. You know, it may be a very ephemeral place. We may only get to see it for a little while. …
“I cut some sections out of them, gave them to Christine DeLong at LSU, and she had them radio carbon dated, and they had to do them three times in all I think because they didn’t believe the results. So they expected them to be 12,000 years old, which was the last ice age. Instead they came back radio carbon dead each time they tested them, which means they’re 50,000 years old or longer. …
“We had another team come out from University of Southern Mississippi, and we had them do a sonar survey so we could try and get an extent of it because I’ve only been swimming around 300 yards of it. It turns out it’s spread close to a mile. …
“CURWOOD: We first aired this story back in 2012 and the fight to protect Alabama’s underwater forest from business interests continues. Scientists and advocates have asked the Biden administration to designate the site a marine sanctuary.”
More at Living on Earth, here.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
It must be mind blowing to find a forest underwater.
I think it would feel a bit like traveling back into ancient times.
A good story, and there is one like that for Lake Tahoe which lies along a fault line which cuts across its outlet and it has also been dammed by glaciation. There is a sunken forest there that apparently grew when the outlet was a couple of hundred feet lower and when the fault blocked that outlet the forest was flooded and did not show above the water line. The trunks are still down there.
Earle Cummings
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You always teach me something.
It does sound enchanting! I hope the area becomes a sanctuary.
An enchanted forest sounds like something your heroine Maya would know about.
That’s crazy cool!
Makes me think scuba diving would be fun.