The Baltic Sea Basin by Jan Harff Svante Björck & Peer Hoth

Author:Jan Harff, Svante Björck & Peer Hoth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

Keywords

Shoreline displacementDrowned forest 14C datingPollen and diatom analysesMiddle HoloceneBaltic SeaGulf of Gdańsk

11.1 Introduction

Stumps of trees occurring in situ on the sea bed are known from many places in the world. The first scientific reports about “sunken forests” appeared in the nineteenth century in Great Britain, where many of them were discovered in coastal areas (e.g. James 1847, Fisher 1862). In the Baltic Sea region, tree stumps rooted in the sea bed were until recently known only from the coastal waters of Denmark and Germany (e.g. Christensen 1995, Lampe 2005, Lampe et al. 2005, Curry 2006, Tauber 2007). In the southwestern part of the Baltic Sea, subboreal tree stumps occur not deeper than 1 m below present sea level (Lampe 2005). Much more common are underwater sites of tree stumps from the Atlantic period drowned in German Baltic waters at depths between 2 and 14 m below present sea level (Lampe et al. 2005). The tree stumps of pine (Pinus) in situ have also been identified offshore in Lithuanian waters (Damusyte et al. 2004, Damusyte 2006). Conventional radiocarbon ages (14C) for these trees are 9,160 ± 60 and 6,930 ± 130 years BP and the water depths 27.0 and 14.5 m, respectively.

In Poland, numerous localities of tree stumps on beaches between Rowy and Łeba have been known for many years (e.g. Tobolski et al. 1981, Krąpiec and Florek 2005). The ages of the stumps examined there (oak, ash, alder and pine) ranged from 4,610 to 210 years BP. The first tree stumps found in situ in the Polish coastal zone of the Baltic Sea were reported from Puck Lagoon. The wood of a stump excavated from a depth of about 3 m was dated to 9,370±90 BP (Gd–7938) (unpublished data). The peat deposits at the bottom of Puck Lagoon are of a similar age, having been formed in the Preboreal and Boreal periods. Puck Lagoon itself is much younger, existing since the end of the Atlantic period (e.g. Kramarska et al. 1995, Uścinowicz and Miotk-Szpiganowicz 2003). During field work carried out by the Polish Geological Institute in 2006 in the Vistula Lagoon (Polish: Zalew Wiślany; German: Frisches Haff; Russian: Kaliningradskiy Zaliv), tree stumps rooted in peat have been recognized around the site with coordinates 54°24.03′N and 19°42.61′E (some 5 km NE of Frombork). The alder stumps rooted in subboreal peat at a depth of 2 m were dated to 4,770±35 BP (Poz-15115) and 3,295±35 BP (Poz-1516) (Łęczyński et al. 2007).

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