AlaskaAV
GONE WEST
Mission, TX
Following is a news article that was released today about the petrified forests on the Alaska Chain and it turned the good old light bulb on again.
After reading this story, continue reading about some rather strange things I found on the arctic coast of Alaska.
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Alaska Island Home to Petrified Forest
By DAN JOLING
.c The Associated Press
UNGA ISLAND, Alaska (AP) - If you want to stroll through the only forest in the Shumagin Islands, you have to wear rubber boots and wait until the tide goes out.
In the Shumagins, where the wind never seems to stop, the few live trees were planted by people. But along a stretch of beach on the northwest corner of Unga Island, there's a grove that hasn't grown for millions of years.
Wind and water have worn away a 50-foot bluff to reveal a forest of petrified tree stumps that appear to be marching into the ocean. Unga is the largest of the dozen or so Shumagin Islands, 570 miles southwest of Anchorage near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula.
``It's like there was a great big Paul Bunyan - chopped them off all even,'' said Bill Dushkin, president of Shumagin Corp., the Alaska Native village corporation for Sand Point, which owns the land under the trees.
The trees are one of the oddities of Alaska, right up there with warm-blooded dinosaur fossils found north of the Brooks Range on the North Slope. The trees are believed to be sequoia, which grow in northern California, or metasequoia, now found mostly in China. Neither apparently have any business being so far north.
The petrified forest, much of it below tide line, covers about five miles of beach. On a sunny day, the petrified tree stumps stand out white and bright against the gray-black beach rock. From the bluff, they look like marshmallows on charcoal.
Hardly anybody visits this part of Unga. A small airplane can land a mile away but the few people who visit usually come by skiff. On a sunny summer day, with the mountains of the Alaska Peninsula as a backdrop six miles away, the only sound was the beating of a raven's wings and the occasional breaker washing against beach rocks.
Bruce Giffen, a geologist with the National Park Service, said the trees appeared about 25 million years ago, when paleontologists believe the Earth was warmer and the first horses and elephants with trunks emerged.
The trees were likely toppled by a mud flow during a volcanic eruption. The mud snapped off the trees and encased them. Over millions of years, the organic material of the trees was replaced by minerals seeping into the trees and taking their shape.
``Flow from the volcano came down and engulfed those trees and basically snapped them off at their stumps, or somewhere in the height of the trees,'' Giffen said.
Different minerals turned the trees different color - some are studies in slate and white, some are cream, red or orange. Their sizes vary, also: One of the largest is on the beach, a preserved log 67 paces long. The stumps range in diameter from a couple of feet to about 9 feet across.
Dushkin first saw the trees as a boy on a trip to dig razor clams. When villages were allowed to claim federal land under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the Shumagin Corp. chose this part of Unga.
Dushkin sees tourism possibilities in the forest. His corporation owns the only hotel in Sand Point, a city of about 1,000 a half-hour's boat ride away. Dushkin would like to attract visitors in the months when the area's main source of dollars, commercial fishing, has slowed.
So far, only a few small cruise ships stop at the petrified forest. One of them is the Clipper Odyssey leased by Zegrahm Expeditions, an adventure tour company based in Seattle.
Zegrahm President Scott Fitzsimmons said Unga will be a stop in August for a cruise that starts in Nome and visits islands in the Bering Sea. Visitors take inflatable boats to Unga to see the petrified forest, or bird rookeries or the abandoned Unga town site.
The cruise ship's lecturers are augmented by Shumagin Corp. members hired as guides.
Dushkin believes visitors may someday be seeing the forest through glass-bottom boats. He has approached the beach in his fishing boat, with radar indicating something on the ocean floor 12-18 feet high, rising like posts.
``I think there are underwater trees there,'' he said.
On the Net:
Shumagin Corp.: http://www.shumagin.com
Zegrahm Expeditions: http://www.zeco.com
08/03/04 03:23 EDT
>>>>
Many inhabited areas across Alaska have been found dating back some 10,000 years.
The article above is very interesting to me since I have seen redwood tree remains along the arctic coast. Just a couple of miles northwest of the Deadhorse airport, a drilling company was drilling a test well and bringing up core samples to send outside for testing. It was strange in a way because they would always have a Lear Jet or equal aircraft sitting on the ramp ready to crank up. The core samples were brought to the aircraft in boxes under very heavy guard and flown stateside somewhere to be run through a lab. This was before Prudhoe Bay was active.
At one point as I was driving by the test hole, I noticed the pickup belonging to the project manager of BP sitting at the site so went over to talk to him. He brought a core sample over to me so I could see what was coming up. There were actual pieces of a redwood tree, not fossilized but actual wood, that was cut out by the core drill. This wood came from about 500 foot below ground level where the permafrost (anything frozen solid for two consecutive years, soil or ice or mixture of both) went down about 1,000 feet. Remember, this was about 1,000 miles from the North Pole and I assume back in those days, Santa wore shorts instead of the warm duds he uses now. Personal opinion of course.
Along the north coast of Alaska, the ground is more or less level and about 10 to 15 foot above the water level of the Arctic Ocean. There is only some 6" tide in that area compared to maybe 28 foot in the Cook Inlet near Anchorage.
When there is a very strong onshore wind, there can be rather large waves that pound the bluff and melts the permafrost. There are several areas where complete redwood trees were found below the surface when the waves washed them out. These trees were 6 to 8 inches or more in diameter and had complete root systems attached so there is no way they could have washed ashore. In addition, many different kinds of sea shells normally from a warm area can be found. Sea shells have been found to rather deep depths in the core samples also.
Further inland and on the surface, many huge tusks have been found. As the news article above states, many dinosaur fossils have been found as well as tusks from the woolly mammoth and other animals of that era. Saber tooth tigers roamed the area also, possibly from Asia?
It is illegal to possess any of those tusks of course but many pilots flying overhead have spotted and reported them and a government crew would be flown in to catalog and retrieve them.
Since Wien was the only airline serving the area, we flew everything out so I got to see a lot needless to say. Lots of our light aircraft pilots would fly low just to spot them. Kind a feather in their hat so to speak when they could report something good to the "bad guys" for a change.
At one point when living in Barrow, Alaska, we had to melt ice from fresh water lakes for all the water we used. We used Teflon lined 55 gal drums to melt it. At one point, I ran into something that I still can't believe. The ice hauler brought in a dog sled load of ice and we started melting it and all of a sudden, small fish appeared. Come to find out, fish would become frozen in the ice that froze clear to the bottom of the lakes over the winter and when the ice melted in the spring, they would start growing again. It is bad enough to worry about "ice worms" but when it came to ice fish, that went a little too far but it is true, I swear. Anyone for snipe hunting?
After living with this kind of surroundings, it really wasn't much of a surprise to stand next to a 50 foot long whale weighing maybe 50 tons and watch it being cut up to feed the town. I have seen many fish that were kind of nice looking but not a whale.
When in Hawai'i and when we took the Maui Lu II http://supercub.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album128out (if it works) for a Sunday cruise to charge up the batteries and have a 40 to 50 foot whale surface maybe 20 foot away from us and swim along side, it was something else for our resort guests.
After reading this story, continue reading about some rather strange things I found on the arctic coast of Alaska.
<<<<
Alaska Island Home to Petrified Forest
By DAN JOLING
.c The Associated Press
UNGA ISLAND, Alaska (AP) - If you want to stroll through the only forest in the Shumagin Islands, you have to wear rubber boots and wait until the tide goes out.
In the Shumagins, where the wind never seems to stop, the few live trees were planted by people. But along a stretch of beach on the northwest corner of Unga Island, there's a grove that hasn't grown for millions of years.
Wind and water have worn away a 50-foot bluff to reveal a forest of petrified tree stumps that appear to be marching into the ocean. Unga is the largest of the dozen or so Shumagin Islands, 570 miles southwest of Anchorage near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula.
``It's like there was a great big Paul Bunyan - chopped them off all even,'' said Bill Dushkin, president of Shumagin Corp., the Alaska Native village corporation for Sand Point, which owns the land under the trees.
The trees are one of the oddities of Alaska, right up there with warm-blooded dinosaur fossils found north of the Brooks Range on the North Slope. The trees are believed to be sequoia, which grow in northern California, or metasequoia, now found mostly in China. Neither apparently have any business being so far north.
The petrified forest, much of it below tide line, covers about five miles of beach. On a sunny day, the petrified tree stumps stand out white and bright against the gray-black beach rock. From the bluff, they look like marshmallows on charcoal.
Hardly anybody visits this part of Unga. A small airplane can land a mile away but the few people who visit usually come by skiff. On a sunny summer day, with the mountains of the Alaska Peninsula as a backdrop six miles away, the only sound was the beating of a raven's wings and the occasional breaker washing against beach rocks.
Bruce Giffen, a geologist with the National Park Service, said the trees appeared about 25 million years ago, when paleontologists believe the Earth was warmer and the first horses and elephants with trunks emerged.
The trees were likely toppled by a mud flow during a volcanic eruption. The mud snapped off the trees and encased them. Over millions of years, the organic material of the trees was replaced by minerals seeping into the trees and taking their shape.
``Flow from the volcano came down and engulfed those trees and basically snapped them off at their stumps, or somewhere in the height of the trees,'' Giffen said.
Different minerals turned the trees different color - some are studies in slate and white, some are cream, red or orange. Their sizes vary, also: One of the largest is on the beach, a preserved log 67 paces long. The stumps range in diameter from a couple of feet to about 9 feet across.
Dushkin first saw the trees as a boy on a trip to dig razor clams. When villages were allowed to claim federal land under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the Shumagin Corp. chose this part of Unga.
Dushkin sees tourism possibilities in the forest. His corporation owns the only hotel in Sand Point, a city of about 1,000 a half-hour's boat ride away. Dushkin would like to attract visitors in the months when the area's main source of dollars, commercial fishing, has slowed.
So far, only a few small cruise ships stop at the petrified forest. One of them is the Clipper Odyssey leased by Zegrahm Expeditions, an adventure tour company based in Seattle.
Zegrahm President Scott Fitzsimmons said Unga will be a stop in August for a cruise that starts in Nome and visits islands in the Bering Sea. Visitors take inflatable boats to Unga to see the petrified forest, or bird rookeries or the abandoned Unga town site.
The cruise ship's lecturers are augmented by Shumagin Corp. members hired as guides.
Dushkin believes visitors may someday be seeing the forest through glass-bottom boats. He has approached the beach in his fishing boat, with radar indicating something on the ocean floor 12-18 feet high, rising like posts.
``I think there are underwater trees there,'' he said.
On the Net:
Shumagin Corp.: http://www.shumagin.com
Zegrahm Expeditions: http://www.zeco.com
08/03/04 03:23 EDT
>>>>
Many inhabited areas across Alaska have been found dating back some 10,000 years.
The article above is very interesting to me since I have seen redwood tree remains along the arctic coast. Just a couple of miles northwest of the Deadhorse airport, a drilling company was drilling a test well and bringing up core samples to send outside for testing. It was strange in a way because they would always have a Lear Jet or equal aircraft sitting on the ramp ready to crank up. The core samples were brought to the aircraft in boxes under very heavy guard and flown stateside somewhere to be run through a lab. This was before Prudhoe Bay was active.
At one point as I was driving by the test hole, I noticed the pickup belonging to the project manager of BP sitting at the site so went over to talk to him. He brought a core sample over to me so I could see what was coming up. There were actual pieces of a redwood tree, not fossilized but actual wood, that was cut out by the core drill. This wood came from about 500 foot below ground level where the permafrost (anything frozen solid for two consecutive years, soil or ice or mixture of both) went down about 1,000 feet. Remember, this was about 1,000 miles from the North Pole and I assume back in those days, Santa wore shorts instead of the warm duds he uses now. Personal opinion of course.
Along the north coast of Alaska, the ground is more or less level and about 10 to 15 foot above the water level of the Arctic Ocean. There is only some 6" tide in that area compared to maybe 28 foot in the Cook Inlet near Anchorage.
When there is a very strong onshore wind, there can be rather large waves that pound the bluff and melts the permafrost. There are several areas where complete redwood trees were found below the surface when the waves washed them out. These trees were 6 to 8 inches or more in diameter and had complete root systems attached so there is no way they could have washed ashore. In addition, many different kinds of sea shells normally from a warm area can be found. Sea shells have been found to rather deep depths in the core samples also.
Further inland and on the surface, many huge tusks have been found. As the news article above states, many dinosaur fossils have been found as well as tusks from the woolly mammoth and other animals of that era. Saber tooth tigers roamed the area also, possibly from Asia?
It is illegal to possess any of those tusks of course but many pilots flying overhead have spotted and reported them and a government crew would be flown in to catalog and retrieve them.
Since Wien was the only airline serving the area, we flew everything out so I got to see a lot needless to say. Lots of our light aircraft pilots would fly low just to spot them. Kind a feather in their hat so to speak when they could report something good to the "bad guys" for a change.
At one point when living in Barrow, Alaska, we had to melt ice from fresh water lakes for all the water we used. We used Teflon lined 55 gal drums to melt it. At one point, I ran into something that I still can't believe. The ice hauler brought in a dog sled load of ice and we started melting it and all of a sudden, small fish appeared. Come to find out, fish would become frozen in the ice that froze clear to the bottom of the lakes over the winter and when the ice melted in the spring, they would start growing again. It is bad enough to worry about "ice worms" but when it came to ice fish, that went a little too far but it is true, I swear. Anyone for snipe hunting?
After living with this kind of surroundings, it really wasn't much of a surprise to stand next to a 50 foot long whale weighing maybe 50 tons and watch it being cut up to feed the town. I have seen many fish that were kind of nice looking but not a whale.
When in Hawai'i and when we took the Maui Lu II http://supercub.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album128out (if it works) for a Sunday cruise to charge up the batteries and have a 40 to 50 foot whale surface maybe 20 foot away from us and swim along side, it was something else for our resort guests.
