Inspectors look at ways to protect fossil forest from American workers

Ed Struzik

EDMONTON -- Federal officials will decide this week whether anything can or will be done about an American excavation of a 45-million-year-old fossil forest

in the High Arctic that was targeted for United Nations World Heritage site status.

Two federal inspectors are expected to be on the scene today to examine the situation.

The fossil forests is located on Axel Heiberg Island, an uninhabited island in the High Arctic that is covered by mountainous glaciers and huge expanses of polar

desert.

Discovered in 1985, the fossil forest is now recognized as one of the largest, oldest and most exquisitely preserved sites of its kind in the world. So far, more than

1,000 stumps and tree trunks -- some of them more than six metres long and 2.5 metres wide -- have been mapped out from a time when the polar region was

warm enough to produce dawn redwood swamps and boreal forest uplands that were inhabited by rhinoceros-like creatures and alligators.

Many of the trees, walnuts, spruce and pines cones, seeds and nuts that have been retrieved thus far are almost completely non-mineralized, and appear as if they

were buried beneath the ground just a few years ago.

A 15-person American team, using chainsaws, picks, shovels and ground-penetrating radar to find and dissect trees, have all of the necessary permits.

Scientists and at least one federal government agency had previously warned that the fossil forest site may be too fragile for large-scale intervention.