In South Mississippi, counting pollen is usually done by sneezes. Or square feet. Not individually under a microscope. But, most of the pollen being counted by south Mississippians isn’t 60,000 years old.
Trapped under the ocean floor.
Andy Reese, a biogeographer at the University of Southern Mississippi, counts individual beads of pollen in his lab. The pollen he counts is “cored” from under the ocean floor from a forest that is over 60,000 years old.
“What is now about six miles off the coast of Orange Beach, Alabama used to be land, Reese said. “And we think a Cypress-Tupelo swamp was in this depression and it was able to be preserved when sea-level rose.”
Getting the cores from under the water isn’t easy. “Core-ing” involves digging up soil samples from the terrestrial dirt found under the ocean floor. They do this by inserting a long tube – think of it like a giant cookie cutter – into the ocean floor. When the tube is removed, it pulls all of the dirt up with it.
That dirt is full of all of the scientific information Reese and his team needs.
“If you think about it, you’ve got the floor of the ocean, and the trunks of these trees are still upright,”Reese said. “But underneath that is terrestrial soil.”
The cores are then dissected for individual pollen. That pollen is then charted, graphed, and the data are interrogated to figure out just what was going on in the forest when it was still, well, a forest.
“So we are able to core down through the 60-to-70 thousand year old soil,” Reese said. “And what I do as a pollen expert is reconstruct the pollen data to see what plants used to live there.”
As the climate warmed during the past 60,000 years, there are different hypotheses about what occurred. One line of thinking is that the sea-level rose and in one large event, this swampy forest was overtaken by the ocean. And over time it was buried by sediment, preserving the trees and pollen.
Reese even casually mentioned that the pollen from 50,000 years ago was the same as the pollen today. When asked if Reese could pollinate a tree today with pollen from one of the cores, he said it was possible.
“It could be done,” Reese said.
But he also noted, that finding a complete pollen isn’t likely.
Reese and his team recently received a grant from the Bureau of ocean and energy Management, which is under the Department of the Interior. The grant was for 500,000 dollars. It will allow Reese and his team to continue their research in an attempt to get to the bottom of what this, now-underwater, forest was all about.
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