WUDA, China, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say a 300 million-year-old tropical forest was preserved in ash, Pompeii-like, when a volcano erupted in what is today northern China.
University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn says the site, located near Wuda, China, is a snapshot of a moment in time when volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest, preserving the plants as they fell, in many cases in the exact locations where they grew.
"It's marvelously preserved," Pfefferkorn said in a Penn release Monday. "We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That's really exciting."
Pfefferkorn, working with Chinese colleagues, has been able to date the ash layer to approximately 298 million years ago, when Earth's continental plates were still moving toward each other to form the supercontinent Pangea.
China existed then as two smaller continents near the equator, and thus had a tropical climate encouraging forest growth, researchers said.
The volcanic ash has captured a moment in Earth's history, Pfefferkorn said.
"It's like Pompeii: Pompeii gives us deep insight into Roman culture, but it doesn't say anything about Roman history in and of itself.
"But on the other hand, it elucidates the time before and the time after. This finding is similar. It's a time capsule and therefore it allows us now to interpret what happened before or after much better."
