In search of the first forests: thirty years of global travels

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Earth scientists have the privilege and pleasure of exploring all parts of the world, from poles to tropics, from great heights to ocean depths and even beyond, in their search for the information that addresses important challenges relating to the history of the planet.

In the Voyages of Great Discoveries series, internationally recognised experts in a variety of disciplines will present accounts of their adventures in the field, followed by the joys, tribulations and indeed satisfaction experienced in the laboratory as they make the discoveries that have transformed our science.

Our public lecture series are free events that attract a diverse audience, including the public, secondary school pupils and professionals. The series aims to open up areas of interest in the Earth and environmental sciences and present new research in this area to the public.

Abstract

For more than 30 years Chris Berry has travelled to distant places to build on our knowledge of the Earth-transforming primeval forests of the Devonian era, about 380 million years ago. Over these three decades, many discoveries have been made which have completely changed the way we visualise the Earth’s oldest forests, and how we understand the forests to have interacted with the early Earth System.

Chris will take you on a journey from the arctic wildernesses of Greenland and Svalbard to the steamy jungles of South America, and from remote parts of China to the foothills of the Catskill Mountains to show how fossils of early trees have been found, from the tiniest cells and organs to vast rooting systems and trunks, and how the parts are reconstructed as entire trees.

Geological evidence from the earliest fossil forests allows us to place the different tree types into specific ecological settings, and to begin to understand the diversity of the forests and the environments in which the earliest forests grew. The biological innovations in the Devonian forests changed the composition of the atmosphere and provided the biological toolkit to be later transformed into the Carboniferous Coal forests which are of such significance to South Wales.

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Voyages of great discoveries

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