NEWS & PRESS RELEASES

Rooted pine stump on the floor of the Baltic Sea, about 10,000 years old. Photo: © J. Lemte / IK Foundation.

TITLE: The IK Foundation initiates protection of ancient landscapes on the floor of the Baltic Sea DATE: April 2009 ARTICLE CONTENT: TO LEARN ABOUT THE NATURAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE BALTIC SEA IS TO UNDERSTAND ITS FUTURE - The IK Foundation initiates protection of ancient landscapes on the floor of the Baltic Sea - THE BALTIC is a sea with a dramatic history, its waters having varied from fresh to salt, where the continual transformations of the shorelines since the end of the last ice age have influenced the life that has sprung from the once virginal ground. Due to these transformations, where there is dry land today there has sometimes only been water, or where there is now water human beings, animals and plants once lived thousands of years ago. For centuries people have marvelled at what has been fished or washed up along its various coasts, sometimes even archaeological artefact's - dugout canoes, flint tools, fragments of harpoons and remains of the forested wildernesses of the ancient landscapes. During the 1980s a variety of different research projects were carried out in the southern part of the Baltic Sea to make a closer study of its early evolution after the last ice age. The project initiated and completed by the research organisation IK Foundation was undertaken in collaboration with, among others, the Marine Geology Institute at the University of Göteborg and the Department of Quaternary Geology at the University of Lund. The work, which was cross-disciplinary, involved pioneering sea-floor investigations of both a geological and archaeological nature at depths down to about 60 metres. The results of these were were to reveal hitherto unknown details regarding former sea levels and how the changes in these have impacted on coastal landscapes and life forms before, during and after these continuously occurring fluctuations. In some of the investigations the field work led to the globally unique discovery of fossil landscapes at various depths in the Baltic Sea - where the stumps of the earliest pine forests still stood on the same spot where they once grew from a seed 10,000 years ago. In thick layers of peat and mud analyses revealed the flora and fauna of a long-since vanished ;landscape, information that also threw light on the opportunities for human beings to survive by hunting and fishing. For the first time human beings were able to see a silent landscape that had lain hidden for millennium - and images of that landscape in the form of peat ridges, remnants of the earliest forest of pine trees and archaeological finds were disseminated around the world. The work has provided the basis for many new projects and articles and not least the inspiration for similar field projects in other parts of the world. In order to understand the Baltic Sea and its future one has to grasp its natural and cultural history. When the project "Sea Voyage 2009" now focuses attention on the east coast of southern Scandinavia and its waters, the work is supported by information from the IK Foundation. Among other things, the IK Foundation is encouraging a debate by proposing that certain unique areas in the world with a concentration of traces of ancient landscapes and human activity should be protected by being designated as geological world-heritage sites or alternatively as areas classified for protection in other ways. The documentation that Sea Voyage 2009 (www.havsresan.se) will record on site will thus provide yet another impetus to support an important process of protection and to stimulate further research on the subject. REFERENCES: Hansen, L., 1987: Submarina gyttjor, torv och stubbar. Ett forntida arkiv. Skånes Natur, 265-282 Hansen, L., 1995 Submerged Mesolithic landscapes. Preliminary results from the Hanö Bay, Southern Baltic. Fischer, A (editor) Man and Sea in the Mesolithic . Oxford: Oxbow Monograph no 53.