The Falkland Islands are known today for cool winds, broad grasslands, and very few trees. That modern picture is accurate, but it is not the whole story. Pollen found beneath the capital shows these islands once supported a cool-temperate forest – wet, shaded, and biologically rich.

The clue came from a dark, woody layer uncovered during construction in Stanley. It was not random debris.

It was a buried forest bed – plant-heavy sediment preserved in place – holding microscopic grains and real pieces of ancient wood.

Forest pollen and wood fragments

Scientists collected three kinds of evidence: pollen grains, spores, and chunks of fossilized wood.

Pollen and spores keep their species-specific shapes for millions of years when they get trapped in wet sediment and then buried.

Wood fragments preserve internal features that point to the type of tree and the conditions in which it grew.

This layer is lignitic – formed as plant material piled up in waterlogged, low-oxygen settings where leaves and twigs do not fully rot.

Over time, that mush compressed into a dense, carbon-rich stratum, likely in a shallow, protected basin near the coast.

Collecting and identifying samples

After the discovery, Dr. Zoë Thomas of the University of Southampton hurried to the site with colleagues to salvage fresh samples before they dried and cracked.

“The tree remains were so pristinely preserved they looked like driftwood,” recalled Dr. Thomas.

In the lab, the team separated tiny grains from the sediment and examined them under high magnification.

The mix showed southern beech (Nothofagus) and podocarps – Southern Hemisphere conifers – alongside moisture-loving plants that thrive in soggy ground.

“The fossil pollen, spores, and wood paint a much different picture of the ancient environment, providing direct evidence of cool, wet forests,” noted Michael Donovan, collections manager at Chicago’s Field Museum.

Reading the forest’s pollen and wood

Pollen alone can be misleading because wind can carry it far. That is why the wood matters.

Wood anatomy – cell sizes, pits, and rays – helps confirm whether pieces came from conifers or broadleaf trees and whether the community matches the pollen record.

Here, it does. The agreement points to a local forest, not distant pollen that drifted in.

Modern relatives of Nothofagus and podocarps form cool, mossy forests in parts of southern Chile and Patagonia.

Their presence in the Falklands’ fossil record supports the idea that the islands once held a wet, shaded habitat.

Dating the forest fossils

Radiocarbon dating tops out around 50,000 years, so the team turned to regional comparison. They lined up the Falklands’ pollen ‘cast’ with well-dated South American records.

When the same key pollen types appear and fade in the same order across sites, timelines can be matched.

Those comparisons point to the mid-to-late Cenozoic – tens of millions of years ago – when warmer intervals let rainforests extend to higher latitudes and outlying islands.

Pollen explains the disappearing forest

Islands get new species in bursts. Seeds and spores ride wind, float on ocean debris, and travel with birds. During milder, wetter stretches, the odds of survival jump.

Once early trees took root in a sheltered, waterlogged basin, they could trap moisture, calm ground-level winds, and gradually build a stable community.

That is a familiar pattern in island biology. Given time and the right conditions, a few arrivals can turn into a functioning forest.

The climate shifted. Cooling trends and glacial cycles brought colder, windier conditions.

The Falklands lack high mountains to block strong westerlies or snag extra rainfall, and many soils are thin and peaty. Those factors make it hard for trees to outcompete grasses today.

Ecosystems do not just follow latitude. Local wind, rainfall, and topography set the rules. Under the current rules, open grassland wins across most of the islands.

Why does any of this matter?

Fossil evidence gives climate scientists real targets for testing models.

If a model run with mid-to-late Cenozoic conditions places a cool-temperate rainforest on the Falklands, that is a sign it is on track. If it does not, something is missing.

These checks turn evidence from a single site into valuable test data.

There is also a wider lesson. Ecosystems can move, shrink, expand, or appear in places that seem unusual by today’s standards.

The Falklands’ buried forest shows how temperature, rainfall, and wind can reshuffle living communities over long spans of time.

Building the case

Fieldwork documented and sampled the lignitic layer in place. Lab work isolated pollen and spores, then identified them under microscopes.

Wood pieces were sectioned to reveal diagnostic features. Together, those signals established both habitat and local origin.

For age, researchers matched the Falklands’ pollen sequence to dated South American profiles, tracking the same marker taxa as they rose and fell.

That approach pinned the layer to a deep time window without relying on radiocarbon.

What have we learned?

To sum it all up, hidden beneath Stanley on the Falkland Islands lies a pollen record of a cool, wet forest dominated by southern beech and podocarp relatives, growing in a sheltered, waterlogged basin.

The age falls in the mid-to-late Cenozoic, when warmer intervals allowed trees to push farther poleward and onto islands.

This clear snapshot – written in pollen, spores, and wood – adds a useful data point to Earth’s climate history and helps scientists check the tools we use to understand past, present, and future change.

The full study was published in the journal Antarctic Science.

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