Geospatial Prediction of Preserved Submerged Paleo Forests on the Northern Gulf of Mexico Continental Shelf
Abstract
Discovery in 2005 of a well-preserved drowned bald cypress forest offshore Alabama has spurred the search for analogous sites, as they provide valuable paleoclimate proxies and potential paleohuman habitats. However, forests are difficult to detect when buried beneath the seabed, and degrade rapidly when exposed to the water column. In this study, the Naval Research Lab's Global Predictive Seabed Model (GPSM) is used to geospatially predict the location of buried ancient forests offshore Mississippi and Alabama. Over 500 sediment cores recording presence or absence of wood debris are used as a proxy for probability of preserved buried forest location. These data are used as training and validation data for machine learning algorithms, and predicted paleo-topographic surface models from the last two glacial maxima are used as predictors. Geospatial predictions show that the highest probability of encountering wood-bearing sediments is along the fringes of paleovalleys, which is corroborated by the location of the only preserved drowned forest discovered to date in the Northern Gulf of Mexico. These predictions will be used to guide future data acquisition efforts.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFMPP44B..03O