Axel Heiberg Island
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Axel Heiberg Island is the 31st largest island in the world and Canada's 7th largest island. According to Statistics Canada [1], it has an area of 43 178 km² (16,671 square miles).
The island is known for its unusual fossil forests, which in some theories, date from the Eocene period. Due to the lack of mineralization in many of the forest specimens, the traditional characterization of "fossilisation" fails for these forests and "mummification" may be a clearer description. It is clear that the Axel Heiberg forest was a semi-tropical swamp. [1]
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[edit] History of Axel Heiberg Island
Axel Heiberg Island has been inhabited in the past by Inuit people, but was uninhabited by the time it was named by Otto Sverdrup, who explored it around 1900. He named it after Axel Heiberg, manager of the Norwegian Ringnes brewery which sponsored the expedition[2]. Other explorers visited the island during the early 20th century, during which time it was claimed by Norway until 1930. It wasn't until the late 1940s that the island was aerially photographed by the United States Army Air Forces' Operation Polaris. In 1955 two geologists of the Geological Survey of Canada, N.J. McMillan and Souther, traversed the interior as part of Operation Franklin. McMillan's observations of Bunde Glacier, in northwest Axel Heiberg Island, are the earliest glaciological observations on the ground to have found their way into a scientific publication.
In 1959, scientists from McGill University explored Expedition Fiord (previously Sør Fjord or South Fiord) in central Axel Heiberg Island. This resulted in the establishment of the McGill Arctic Research Station (), constructed 8 km inland from Expedition Fjord in 1960. It consists of a small research hut, a cookhouse and 2 temporary structures that can comfortably accommodate 8-12 persons. The station was busiest during the early 1960s, during which a population of 20 was present. The station is now only used for specific studies during the summer months.
During the summer of 1986, a Canadian expedition headed by Dr James Basinger set out to investigate this very unusual fossil forest. The findings of the expeditions and research have since been popularly reported in Canada [3] [4] [5]
As late as 1999, the preservation of this unique site has been endangered. The unique mummified wood was being used for campfires by unknown persons or taken away by tourists on luxury liners cruising the Arctic Ocean. Every August, passengers from cruise ships arrive to tour the site. Canadian military helicopters have been landing on the most sensitive areas.
American plans have also been in progress to excavate the fossil forest. The issue is not whether research should be carried out, but which country should be principally involved in this pursuit.
The fossil forest, which lies outside the borders of the new Quttinirpaaq National Park(formerly Ellesmere Island National Park) on Ellesmere Island, is unprotected from the damage that visitors can inflict. The future protection of the unique fossil forest on Axel Heiberg Island appears to lie in the hands of the Nunavut government. It is an issue of territorial jurisdiction.
[edit] Geography
Axel Heiberg Island is the largest of the Sverdrup Islands, part of the Queen Elizabeth Islands archipelago in Nunavut Territory, Canada. It lies around the 80°N line of latitude, west of Ellesmere Island. It is slightly north of the North magnetic pole. The island is covered by mountainous glaciers and huge expanses of polar desert. The higher, central area of the island is covered by a plateau glacier.
[edit] Flora and Fauna
Today, the only woody plant found on Axel Heiberg Island is the arctic willow. Its sprouts may reach a few inches high, even in the protection of stumps that once bore trees reaching a hundred feet high.
[edit] Paleontology
The fossil forest is located on the northeast corner of Axel Heiberg. "Discovered by helicopter pilot Paul Tudge and Geological Survey of Canada scientists in August 1985, the forest is one of the largest, oldest and most exquisitely preserved sites of its kind in the world. Federal and territorial bureaucrats have targeted it for United Nations World Heritage site status. So far, more than 1,000 stumps and tree trunks – some of them more than six metres long and 2.5 metres wide – have been mapped out from a time when the polar region was warm enough to produce dawn redwood swamps, deciduous flood-plains and boreal forest uplands inhabited by rhinoceros-like creatures, soft-shelled turtles, alligators and host of small mammals...The quality of preservation is so extraordinary that scientists believe the forest holds important clues about the ancient history of North America and the global climatic change the world is now facing...Fossils from forest remains can be found throughout the Arctic. But those at Axel Heiberg are extensive and largely preserved as mummifications. Analysis of the remains indicate they were buried in fresh water, probably by a flood, in an environment where little or no mineralization could undermine the organic integrity of the trees, cones, twigs, leaf litters, boles and roots. Some of the specimens are so perfectly preserved that they are almost indistinguishable from the wood one would find on the floor of a modern coniferous forest...Two trees dominated the ancient swamp forest at Axel Heiberg – Metasequoia or dawn redwood, and Glyptostrobus, the swamp cypress. Evidence of the existence of other plants is rare, but Osmunda – or royal fern – has been identified...The upland flora is represented by tough things such as pinecones, spruce cones and the woody nuts of walnut that could survive being washed into the forest site by river...It was a relatively dry floodplain that occupied most of the region’s terrain. If one could have walked through the broad-leafed deciduous trees, including oak, birch, sycamore and walnuts that grew there, one would have been reminded of the Carolinian forests of Georgia...The presence of dawn redwood and swamp cypress suggest a climate in which the mean annual temperature was between 12 and 15 C, with temperatures perhaps as high as 25 C during the warmest months and just above freezing at the coldest times." [6]
The trunks of the largest trees must have been at least 160 feet tall but these now lay in pieces and aligned in a roughly NW-SE direction between the stumps. The wood is water-logged, but not petrified or turned to stone but is still fresh. Samples have to be collected with a wood saw rather than the geologist's hammer. The wood had lost much of its hemicellulose but retained the bulk of its woody lignin. Most of the oils in the wood have long-ago evaporated resulting in an absence of the "woody" smell when cut, but when dry, the wood burns readily like kindling. Radio-carbon dating would therefore be forthcoming.
That it was a semi-tropical swamp, Dr Jane Francis, an expert on fossil trees, and others concluded that the annual solar energy received by the Arctic today is equivalent to that at lower latitudes. This means that in the absence of the albedo effect caused by the ice today, the level of ambient temperature in the polar regions would be much greater, perhaps even sufficient to support a modest forest. [7] proposed that a catastrophe in the past had caused the albedo of the earth to suddenly change. The evidence of the buried forests abundantly support this. Non-petrified and undecayed wood and leaf material lie preserved beneath the frozen soil proclaims some kind of catastrophe by which the temperature very suddenly dropped not unlike the sudden quick freeze of an event made famous by the discovery of mammoths in arctic regions whose flesh was eaten by wolves with no ill effect.
The forests of Axel Heiberg Island are stacked one above the other with at least twenty layers of tree stumps all in growth positions in one area. Basinger (1987) has proposed that a flood of immense proportions carrying huge quantities of sediment swept over the floodplain and rapidly buried the forests preserving it -- not too shallow for decay and not too deep for petrification. It would be a very rare sequence of events. It raises the obvious question of why stumps evidently having a shallow burial did not rot in a tropical swamp.
Substantial evidence points to the forest being between 45 and 65 million years old during a period of great warmth probably due to high concentration of carbon dioxide within the atmosphere.[8]
[edit] Population
The island is uninhabited except for one small seasonal research station.
[edit] References
- ^ Hooper Natural History Museum, Carleton University: http://hoopermuseum.earthsci.carleton.ca//forest/eocene03.html
- ^ Ringnes "Historie", Ringnes-Carlsberg website (in Norwegian), URL retrieved 19 June 2006
- ^ Thurston, Harry "Icebound Eden" in Equinox (Camden East, Ont) 3:72. 1986
- ^ Basinger, James F "Our 'Tropical' Arctic" in Canadian Geogrpahic (Ottawa) 106:28. 1987
- ^ Foster, Janet "Journey to the Top of the World" Toronto: Greey de Pencier. 1987
- ^ http://www.sas.upenn.edu/earth/arctic/edjosun.html
- ^ Butler and Hoyle ("On the Effects of Sudden Change of the Albedo of the Earth" in Astrophysics and Space Science (Netherlands) 60:505. 1979
- ^ TIME magazine, Sep. 22, 1986: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,962379,00.html
