Indeed, that is what has happened to the upper reaches of the trees, which protrude above the water as weathered poles, stripped of bark and branches. Ordinarily this would have led to their slow decomposition as insects and bacteria chewed away at the dead wood. Their roots, though, became oversaturated, drowning the tall trees.ĭimly visible below the water in this photograph are the still-green branches preserved by the lake’s consistently chilly temperature. This included quite a few Asian, or Schrenk’s, spruce trees, whose upper reaches rose well above the new lake surface. Of course, the landscape within the newly formed basin was drowned, and while no villages or settlements were inundated, the local flora went submarine. Runoff over the following years created Lake Kaindy, a 1300-foot-long body of water, almost 100 feet deep at its lowest point. The debris that came loose blocked a valley, and created a natural dam. Some of the range reaches north of the border into Kazakhstan, and that is where a magnitude 7.7 tremor near Saty caused a landslide back in 1911.
The Tian Shan Mountains arc from western China through Kyrgyzstan, just south of Kazakhstan. So it’s pretty obvious that cold water is a marvelous preservative for wood that falls into it, but a place in Kazakhstan exhibits a stranger situation.
As such, their wood is exceptionally clear and evenly grained, and still excellent for any application. Lying for years or even decades at the bottom of cold lakes, the logs are well preserved, and some are so old that they harken back to the time of logging virgin forests.
No, that doesn’t involve scuba divers with waterproof chainsaws but rather the retrieval of cut logs that were meant to float downstream to a collection area but sank instead. Some time ago, the Geo-Joint looked at underwater logging.
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