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Melting glaciers in Western Canada are revealing tree pulpit up to 7,000 age old where the neighborhood ’s rivers of ice have retreated to a historic lower limit , a geologist said today . Johannes Koch of The College of Wooster in Ohio regain the fresh - sounding , intact Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree ambo beside retreating glaciers in Garibaldi Provincial Park , about 40 miles ( 60 km ) north of Vancouver , British Columbia . Radiocarbon date of the wood from the stump revealed the wood was far from clean — some of it dated back to within a few thousand geezerhood of the final stage of the last ice eld .
" The stumps were in very good consideration , sometimes with bark preserved , " said Koch , who acquit the work as part of his doctoral thesis at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby , British Columbia . Koch will deliver his resultant on Oct. 31 at the Geological Society of America annual coming together in Denver .
Sphinx Glacier: 4,900 years old. Glacier in background.
The pristine status of the Natalie Wood , he said , can better be explained by the stumps having spent all of the last seven millennium under tens to hundreds of meter of frosting . All stumps were still rooted to their original grunge and location .
" Thus they really signal when the glaciers override them , and their kill date give the age of the glacier advance , " Koch said . The eld of the newly unveil ancient trees also indicates how long the glaciers have covered this region .
The recently warming climate release the rostrum from their icy tombs , Koch tell .
Koch compared the kill appointment of the tree diagram in the southerly and northern Coast Mountains of British Columbia and those in the mid- and southern Rocky Mountains in Canada to alike records from the Yukon Territory , the European Alps , New Zealand and South America . He also wait at the age of Oetzi , the prehistorical mummify alpine " Iceman " found at Niederjoch Glacier , and similarly well - preserve wood from glaciers and snowfields in Scandinavia .
The radiocarbon dates seem to be the same around the world , according to Koch . There have been many forward motion and retreats of these glaciers over the retiring 7,000 years , but no retreat that have pushed them back so far upstream as to expose these trees .
The age of the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree rostrum gives young accent to the well - documentedbefore - and - after photographsof retreating glaciers during the past 100 geezerhood .
" It seems like an unprecedented change in a short amount of sentence , " Koch say . " From this work and many other studies looking at forcings of the climate system , one has to move around off from natural one alone to explain this striking modification of the past 150 year . "
