For those unaware the Great Raft was a logjam 165 miles (!) long that clogged the Red and Atchafalaya rivers in North America.
165 miles of logs (x the width of the river) seems like an awful lot of trees. In 1829, the US Army Corps of Engineers hired someone to remove it. A job that took 11 years.
So, dumb question probably, but where did all those trees come from? And how did they make it to the river? It seems like the banks would be clear of trees for miles.
I don’t remember if it’s specifically covered but I’m guessing yes.
I’ve never heard of the Great Raft, and that’s a fascinating story! The article was a very interesting read.
Your link says that it formed over hundreds of years, from the 12th century. So even if it did clear the banks, wouldn’t they have plenty of time to regrow until another flood cleared them out? Rinse repeat a few times?
That Wikipedia article suggests it started in the twelfth century or earlier. That was before European settlers started to harvest trees en masse, so my guess is that most of the trees ended up in the river due to natural processes.
Its all good, I put it in this forum specifically to allow guesses.
The riverbeds of those clay bottomed rivers change direction relatively frequently. Just compare a map or the Mississippi from 1825 to the one today. Every time a river cuts new ground it undermines forests and other vegetation. Once a bottle neck was created, the river had a thousand years or more to feed washed away trees into the unmovable raft.
Re. natural processes, the article says that “the initial formation of the Great Raft was triggered by catastrophic flooding” which included “river bank rotational slips and slab failure, rapid lateral migration”. Those all sound like natural ways for all the trees along the riverbanks to end up in the river.
WAG: it was the sole remaining vestige of a race of super-sapient beavers that populated the region from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Their ambition to flood the planet by building a humongous dam eventually led to disaster, as the construction project usurped their food supply (the head beaver wouldn’t allow any of the trees to be diverted from the dam).
The ensuing beaver diaspora (necessitated by the mass starvation this caused), resulted in the abandonment of the whole shebang.
Interesting video, but that guy’s relentless effort to be funny is exhausting.
So that’s why Castoroides disappeared!
Don’t dead trees rot? How did the raft stay afloat for so long?
They didn’t all need to float; in fact, that was part of the problem. We’re still finding sunken wooden shipwrecks older than the Great Raft.
In deep, cold, airless water. This is on the surface, in Louisiana.
Google AI preview says that it was made up of cottonwood, red cedar, and cypress, and I already suspected that it was made up of cypress since they are found in southern riparian conditions. And both cypress and one of the species in America that is called red cedar are rot-resistant. Which makes sense for trees that are liable to be close to standing water a lot.
The biggest enemy of wood is fungi and insects, so the decomposition process is much slower in waterlogged wood. Of course it’s slowest in cold, deoxygenated water, but as long as trees are waterlogged and not subject to constant tumbling in the current, even floating waterlogged trees will last quite a long time (obviously).
tl;dr it’s the water
You mean, we all thought Timberborn was set in a post apocalyptic future, but it was actually set in the distant past?
I like the part of the story where they’re making good progress, only to find that the logs they send downriver formed a new raft.
Makes sense. Thanks.
There are even people who “harvest” trees that are underwater, either those that were still growing when the area was flooded to create a reservoir, or logs that were harvested but sunk, often many years ago. (These can be logs from now-unavailable species or old-growth trees also no longer available.)
And trees probably did leave the raft, with some frequency, either by rotting or by making it free on the downstream end. All that matters is that new trees are added at a greater rate than they’re removed.