Scientists discover hidden ancient forest on treeless island

Trees haven't grown on the Falkland Islands for thousands of years. But tree trunks and branches preserved in peat suggest the islands were once home to a forest.

No trees have grown on the windswept Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean for tens of thousands of years — just shrubs and other low-lying vegetation. That’s why a recent arboreal discovery nearly 20 feet (6 metres) beneath the ground caught researchers’ attention.

Dr. Zoë Thomas, a lecturer in physical geography at the U.K.’s University of Southampton, was doing fieldwork on the island in 2020 when she got word from a friend that tree trunks had been unearthed from a layer of peat at a building site near the capital of Stanley.

“We thought that’s really weird, because one of the things about the Falklands that everyone knows about is that no trees grow,” said Thomas, lead study author of recent research on the Falklands. “It’s very sort of windswept and barren.”

The Falkland Islands are a British-ruled overseas territory over which Great Britain and Argentina fought a brief war in 1982. Britain won the war, but Argentina continues to claim the islands.

Thomas and colleagues went to the site and began “picking up these big chunks of wood.” The tree remains were so pristinely preserved they looked like driftwood, Thomas said. But knowing the history of the Falklands, the researchers knew the remnants couldn’t be modern.

“The idea that they’d found tree trunks and branches made us think how old can this stuff be? We were pretty sure that no trees had grown there in a long time,” she added.

The presence of the tree fossils suggests the island was once home to a temperate rainforest — a dramatically different ecosystem from the islands’ current environment, Thomas and her collaborators reported earlier this month in the journal Antarctic Science. But the story of this hidden forest goes back even further in time than the researchers initially thought.