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David W. Stahle, Tree-Ring Laboratory, Department of Geosciences, University of Arkansas is heading up the study of the baldcypress forest being recovered in the coastal plain of South Carolina.
Many well-preserved baldcypress logs from 25,000 to 45,000+ years old have been recovered from the sand quarries near the Lynches and Little Pee Dee rivers, South Carolina. These "subfossil" cypress logs are solid to pith, are up to eight feet in diameter and 96 feet long, and can be cut and finished to a high polish suitable for fine woodworking and scientific analysis. Some logs contain hundreds of annual growth rings and present an excellent opportunity for the development of millennia-long tree-chronologies during the late Pleistocene. No long, annually-resolved tree-ring chronologies of such great age exist in North America and they would be valuable for the study of Pleistocene climate changes, investigating long-term variation in atmospheric radiocarbon levels and the global carbon cycle, and will help document the sweeping environmental changes that have taken place on the South Carolina Coastal Plain in the past 50,000 years. -David Stahle
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843-389-9648