Tuesday Talks - Non-analog forests of the coal-forming ice age with Bob Gastaldo, PhD. Colby

Name: Tuesday Talks - Non-analog forests of the coal-forming ice age with Bob Gastaldo, PhD. Colby
Start: 2026-03-17T12:00:00-04:00
Location: 30 Conway Rd, Camden, ME, United States, Maine 04843

Schedule

Tue, 17 Mar, 2026 at 12:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

30 Conway Rd, Camden, ME, United States, Maine 04843 | Camden, ME

The last great ice age that Earth experienced occurred during the coal-forming interval of the Paleozoic Era, lasting nearly 40 million years. The paleotropics during the Carboniferous Period were densely vegetated by a cast of characters unlike those of modern forests.
These ecosystems were dominated by non-seed bearing plants including the club mosses (lycophytes), horsetails (sphenophytes), and ferns (pteridophytes), with seed-bearing gymnosperms minor components of the landscape. The plants grew in both mineral soils and organic soils (peat), with peat forests developed over great geographic expanses.
Thick peat deposits accumulated over geographic areas of several thousand square kilometers, in response to the waxing and waning of southern hemisphere glaciation, resulted in the coal resources that began the Industrial Revolution and modernization.
The talk is designed to explore the character and biodiversity of these forests, buried in their growth position, and their relationships to the advances and retreats of southern hemisphere continental glaciation cycles during the main coal-forming interval, the Pennsylvanian Period.
Note: On Monday, January 19th, 2026, Apple had a security update affecting how links on their IOS devices function. As a result, we recommend downloading the free Microsoft Teams app from the Apple store.
To log into the Tuesday Talks,
· First open the Teams app and then
· Use this Meeting ID: 939 801 137 154 83 and Passcode: 3mQ9tK to log in.
Another option, if you are in the area, please come to Merryspring to watch the talk on our big screen.
This talk is part of Merryspring’s Online Winter Talk series, sponsored by Camden Riverhouse Hotel.
Thanks to the generosity of the Cascade Foundation, the talks will also be recorded for future viewing on our YouTube channel. Click here to view previously recorded programs on Merryspring’s YouTube channel.
Please join us each week at noon from January through April for our Winter & Spring Tuesday Talk series. The link to our online talks can also be found on our website homepage and in each event on the calendar or you may request the link by sending an email to [email protected].
Merryspring is your community nature center offering walking trails, cultivated gardens, wildlife, and ecology and horticulture educational programs all year round. The park is located at the end of Conway Road, just off of Route 1 in Camden behind Hannaford Shopping Plaza. For more information on this program, please contact [email protected] or call 207-236-2239.