A local diver who agreed to help find a fisherman’s lost pole in 2005 never found the rod but instead stumbled on to something much more significant – an ancient river channel 60 feet underwater.
Journalist and documentary filmmaker Ben Raines navigates his boat up the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. He is backing efforts in Congress to protect an underwater forest off the coast of Alabama in the Gulf of Mexico.) -
The wider world first learned of the underwater forest when Raines reported on it in 2011. Now an environmental fellow at the University of South Alabama, Raines recalled his sense of wonder when he persuaded the dive shop owner who found it to take him there for the first time. Dauphin Island would have been a mountain, looking down on a delta that extended much farther south than it currently sits. It was a much colder place, with a climate comparable to modern-day Virginia.
“The stumps out there are huge,” he said. “Many of them are 10 feet across. This is a redwood-sized tree. So these trees would have had a circumference of 30 feet.” That prompted a push for federal legislation. The House of Representatives last month passed a bill by Rep. Jerry Carl to make the area a sanctuary off-limits to harvesting and other commercial activities.
Raines said if the bill does become law, the area would be open to scientific research and divers. He called it a tourism draw “unlike anything else on Earth.” The spot, he added, could quickly become a popular destination because of its location – a short boat ride away and shallow enough to be easily accessible to recreational divers.
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