Doug Ashbury
Northern News Services

NNSL (Nov 27/98) - Way back in the eocene epoch, around 45 million years ago, the High Arctic's thermostat was set a bit higher than today. So much so that Axel Heiberg Island was warm enough for a forest.

During the past few decades, fossilized tree stumps have emerged from this island, which straddles the 80th parallel in the Sverdrup Basin.

The island has also given up an assortment of cones, twigs, seeds and needles, fruit and walnuts.

These mummified forests are held within bands of organic matter.

"It's an exceptional look at a fossilized forest in situ (situated in its natural place and position)," University of Saskatchewan professor James Basinger, giving the Geoscience Forum's Charles Camsell talk Wednesday night at the Explorer Hotel, said.

The tree stumps have been remarkably preserved and can offer a tremendous amount of information about high latitude forests. It's the best example of High Arctic forest. "We come to understand how harsh the environment is. You don't get a landscape anywhere else like this on the planet. But, plants do grow, like the Arctic poppy. The only tree is the Arctic willow," He said.

To imagine what Axel Heiberg Island's forest looked like 45 million years ago, Basinger said all we need do is look at the characteristics of the Carolinas today.

But, some of the trees of long-ago Axel Heiberg Island can only be found today in China, like the dawn redwood and a swamp cypress, also native only to China.

"We realize how the climate has changed enormously (yet) Axel Heiberg has not moved a lot in the past 45 million years, at most a couple of degrees. It was still well above the Arctic Circle."

One factor contributing to the warmer climate way back then, plate tectonics, specifically, the separation of South America from Antarctica. Because water could now circle the South Pole's land mass, the planet's energy distribution system was altered. Another factor, higher levels of greenhouse gases.

Basinger says Axel Heiberg's 45 million-year-old forests help us understand that changes in global climate are most dramatic in the high latitudes. The applications for global warming today are obvious.

But, like so many things in the Arctic, these wooden wonders, which have stood their ground for four-and- one-half-thousand centuries, become another example of the North's fragility. One exposed from their permafrost tombs, they deteriorate quickly.