APPROXIMATELY 50,000 YEARS AGO, SCIENTISTS believe a coniferous forest in the Himalayas was uprooted by some catastrophic natural event—perhaps a colossal glacial melt or earthquake—and traveled miles down a mountainside toward the sea. Over a matter of weeks, the trees were likely obliterated by rocks and boulders, passing through modern-day Nepal and Bangladesh before settling at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal. It was quite a journey for a log.
Though it seems unimaginable for high-altitude trees to wind up under the ocean, an international group of researchers studying sediments in the Bay of Bengal have charted this prehistoric forest’s journey in a new study, published October 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “People have seen wood being transported to the sea by rivers, and we’ve known it was a possibility, but did not know it could happen at this scale,” says Sarah Feakins, an earth scientist at the University of Southern California and co-author of the study. “We were not expecting it at all.”
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