Professor Bob Gastaldo will lead an online presentation on Tuesday, March 17, at 12 p.m., via Microsoft Teams called, Non-Analog Forests of the Coal-Forming Ice Age. This presentation is hosted by Merryspring Nature Center.

According to a Merryspring news release, the last great ice age that Earth experienced occurred during the coal-forming interval of the Paleozoic Era, lasting nearly 40 million years. The paleotropics during the Carboniferous Period were densely vegetated by a cast of characters unlike those of modern forests. These ecosystems were dominated by non-seed bearing plants including the club mosses (lycophytes), horsetails (sphenophytes), and ferns (pteridophytes), with seed-bearing gymnosperms minor components of the landscape. The plants grew in both mineral soils and organic soils (peat), with peat forests developed over great geographic expanses.

Thick peat deposits accumulated over geographic areas of several thousand square kilometers, in response to the waxing and waning of southern hemisphere glaciation, resulted in the coal resources that began the Industrial Revolution and modernization.

Professor Gastaldo is the Whipple-Coddington Professor emeritus in the Department of Geology at Colby College. He joined the college’s faculty in 1999 and continues on an “active retired” status as he continues to investigate wildfire history in the Devonian rocks of Maine and Maritime Canada with funding from the National Science Foundation. His research has taken him to various parts of the world spanning geographies from Xinjiang Province, western China, to the Karoo Basin, South Africa, to coal basins throughout central Europe, and the jungles of Borneo. After leaving the classroom, he and his wife moved from Central Maine to the coast.

This talk is part of Merryspring’s Online Winter Talk series, generously sponsored by Camden Riverhouse Hotel. 

If you prefer to watch the live broadcast on the big screen in the conference room at Merryspring Nature Center, at 30 Conway Road, in Camden, please plan to arrive before 12 p.m. to avoid noise interference during recording. 

Thanks to the generosity of the Cascade Foundation, the talks will also be recorded for future viewing on the Merryspring YouTube channel.

Join Merryspring each week at noon from January through April for the Winter & Spring Tuesday Talk series. The link to the online talks can also be found on the website homepage and in each event on the calendar or you may request the link by sending an email to info@merryspring.org.   

Merryspring is your community nature center offering walking trails, cultivated gardens, wildlife, and ecology and horticulture educational programs all year round. The park is located at the end of Conway Road, just off of Route 1 in Camden behind Hannaford Shopping Plaza. For more information on this program, please contact info@merryspring.org or call 207-236-2239.