What started with a Facebook post has grown into one of the Gulf's most recent scientific discoveries — an ancient underwater forest first revealed off the Alabama coast and now traced across new sites from Florida to Mississippi.

In 2012, journalist Ben Raines shared photos online of tree stumps sitting 60 feet below the surface. Raines first learned about this underwater forest from a local diver who stumbled across the site in 2004. Intrigued, Raines reported the discovery in a story that drew national attention and later produced a documentary in 2020 with the Alabama Coastal Foundation (ACF) that traced the forest’s origins and scientific significance.

Kristine DeLong, a paleoclimatologist and professor at Louisiana State University, saw the post and recognized the potential significance.

“It said, 'swimming with dinosaurs,' and there were these pictures of tree stumps underwater with fish everywhere,” DeLong said. “I thought, well, that can’t be dinosaurs, but if you go 60 feet below sea level, that’s about 11,000 years ago.”

When she and her team collected samples, they found the wood was even older — “radiocarbon dead,” meaning it predated the last 50,000 years. That discovery launched more than a decade of research that has been supported by different grants, donations and organizations, such as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The project began with documenting the original underwater forest site, a grouping of bald cypress stumps that were unburied by Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and had been preserved beneath Gulf waters. Shielded for millennia under layers of sand and sediment, the trees had been entombed since the last Ice Age.

In the research's second phase, Delong’s team set out to find other sites. With tips from fishermen and computer models built by LSU graduate students, the team has now mapped eight to 11 sites in Alabama, along with more than eight others across the Gulf. One location, DeLong said, appears to have been uncovered by Hurricane Sally. After the slow-moving Category 2 storm made landfall at Gulf Shores in 2020, two ancient sites in Florida were briefly exposed — one offshore and another along the Panhandle’s sand dunes. Both have since been covered again by shifting sands and restoration work, but their presence confirmed the forest stretches farther than first imagined.

Researchers have also identified additional underwater forest sites in Mississippi. Around 2018, researchers from the University of Southern Mississippi encountered tree stumps while coring for a separate project. The samples turned out to be “radiocarbon dead,” much like those in Alabama, meaning they were more than 50,000 years old. An approximate of seven sites have been documented across the state; some published in scientific papers, others still under study.

“We’re assuming these are all connected,” DeLong said, noting that even land-based cores have hit pockets of ancient bald cypress wood.

PREDICTIONS AND PROTECTIONS

The findings have both scientific and practical value. For agencies that permit offshore drilling or beach renourishment, the buried pockets of wood pose challenges — clogging equipment and pipelines if struck.

“They want to avoid it,” DeLong said. “So, they were funding us to figure out where these sites are located.”

The forests also serve as unexpected marine habitats. Hurricanes that ruffle the seafloor can expose tree stumps, creating reef-like structures where fish gather.

“When you just have a sandy bottom, there’s not a lot of fish,” DeLong said. “But when you get where the tree stumps are, there’s fish everywhere.”

Raines and ACF have been advocating for the original Alabama site to be designated a Natural Marine Sanctuary, which would federally protect it, since 2020 with support from former U.S. Rep. Jerry Carl and now Rep. Barry Moore.

As previously reported by GCM, without protections and findable by the public, they have said they fear the ancient trees could be subject to commercial exploitation, such as timber production. If federally protected, the location would be made public and likely used for conservation ecotourism. The most recent iteration of the bill made it farther than it has previously, passing the U.S. House in 2024, but it died in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

On a scientific level, the wood holds climate records that stretch back tens of thousands of years, offering a rare glimpse into Ice Age environments. DeLong noted that while submerged forests have been found in places like Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, few are this old.

Raines said he was struck by the scale of the buried forests that were preserved under sediment from melting Ice Age glaciers.

“One thing about it that really impresses me, trees getting buried up to 50 or 60 feet tall; that’s an amazing amount of sediment that covered those trees up fast enough that they hadn’t rotted,” Raines said. “It really set off a major climate upheaval — with floods as those glaciers melted.

"It paints a picture of a much more radical climate than we’ve ever experienced, and that may be a harbinger of things to come.”

For DeLong, the research helps refine models that predict future climate shifts by showing how ecosystems responded in the past.

“The past is the key to the present and the future,” she said. “If we can get models calibrated with these extreme events, we can better predict what’s coming.”

With federal funding for the project set to end soon, DeLong said she hopes momentum continues; not only for research but for preservation.

DeLong said she thinks public support can play a role.

“Contact your congressman and senators,” she urged. “Say we need to protect these sites.”

Gabriella Chavez is a Report for America corps member who writes about growth and development in Baldwin County and our natural spaces for Gulf Coast Media. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://tinyurl.com/yaf8yf5n.