14 DAY TRIAL // As it turns out, the waters off the coast of UK's Norfolk county are home to a forest dating back to prehistoric times. Oddly enough, the forest was discovered not by geologists but by an amateur diver.
What's more, it appears that, before finally being found, the forest spent millennia hidden under the seafloor. Thus, experts say that it was uncovered by the stormy weather that hit this corner of the world last winter.
How the forest was discovered
As mentioned, the remains of ancient underwater forest were found by an amateur diver, 45-year-old Dawn Watson, who was lucky enough to stumble upon them while exploring the North Sea close to the coast of Norfolk.
The diver says that, while swimming around at a distance of just 300 meters (nearly 1,000 feet) from the shoreline, she could not help but notice some odd-looking branches sticking out of the seafloor.
Of the branches Dawn Watson discovered while diving in this region, some measure about 8 meters (26 feet) in length. Hence the fact that, almost as soon as she laid eyes on them, the diver realized that she had just made an amazing discovery.
“The sea was quite rough by the shore so I decided to dive slightly further out and after swimming over 300 meters of sand I found a long blackened ridge,” the amateur diver said in an interview.
“When I looked more closely I realized it was wood and when I swam further along I started finding whole tree trunks with branches on top, which looked like they had been felled,” she added, as cited by EDP24.
The forest thrived during the last Ice Age
Geologists who have had the chance to closely examine the tree stumps and branches discovered by Dawn Watson off the coast of Norfolk say that they used to be part and parcel of a rather impressive forest that thrived during the last Ice Age.
Thus, they add that the trees are about 10,000 years old and that the forest they were once part of most likely covered thousands of acres and stretched as far as Europe. The forest is believed to have disappeared when ancient ice caps melted and global sea levels rose.
Geologists are now hard at work trying to figure out exactly when in our planet's history this forest vanished from sight and ended up being turned into a natural reef populated by all sorts of marine creatures. They also wish to map it and get a better idea of its size.
Who knows, they might even find remains of long-gone sea monsters hidden between these tree branches and tree stumps that spent millennia hidden under the seafloor.
