A newly released documentary details the quest of researchers from LSU and University of Southern Mississippi as they explore a prehistoric underwater forest about 10 miles off the coast of Alabama.
The Washington Post reports the forest was discovered after Ben Raines—an environmental reporter for the Mobile Press Register—heard a rumor about a fishing “honey hole” off the Alabama coast where the red snapper was plentiful.
Raines directed the documentary, which was produced by multimedia group This is Alabama and the Alabama Coastal Foundation.
A local dive shop owner told Raines the fish were congregating around an underwater forest peeking out of the sediment 60 feet below the surface.
Raines spent months persuading the man to take him to the secret location, an effort that paid off in 2011 as soon as Raines got his first glimpse of the forest.
“It was like entering a fairy world,” he tells The Washington Post. “You get down there, and there are these cypress trees, and there are logs lying on the bottom, and you can touch them and peel the bark off.”
“It was an otherworldly experience where you knew you were in this ancient place,” he added. Researchers from LSU and the University of Southern Mississippi set out to determine the age of the underwater forest. They began dating chunks of wood at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory using radiocarbon dating.
The expectation, researchers say, was that the trees would end up being around 10,000 years old. Nobody expected to find out that the trees were about five times that age, Kristine DeLong, an LSU paleoclimatologist, says.
