Axel Heiberg Island is just to the left of Ellesmere Island and has a similar geological record of forests buried beneath layers of sediment – clay, silt, and sand etc. Yes, it is at http://malagabay.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/the-axel-heiberg-absurdities/ … again and it seems like at the moment I am virtually reposting all his posts – but they are so good. You really need to go to the horses mouth as all I can do is give a short indication of content – and what I think might be interesting aspects of what is being said. Grab this – no mineralisation of the organic content has occurred – it was buried abruptly. Cypress needles on the forest floor litter look better than most year old forest floor litter in the modern world – yet it is 40 million years of age (way back in the Eocene).
On one side of the island tree stumps up to 8m long were found, thrown down. It has been suggested flooding played a role – but what kind of flood is capable of knocking down a whole forest. Tree stumps, branches, logs, seeds, cones and leaves have been preserved – but no petrification. Six different species of tree have been discovered – and live in six different geographies in the modern world. Why is that?
The sediments are defined as mudstones, shales, sandstones, and clays, and each episode appears to have preserved trees and vegetation in a general scoop and dump affair. Does this mean there was a succession of flooding events. The author queries whether it might amount to a series of shifts in the axis of rotation – sweeping up forest from the south. He even claims mainstream rejects its own data – which is telling them that it was cold in the Arctic. Mainstream belief is that it was warm – almost subtropical, even though there was darkness throughout a four month winter period (with no warmth from the Sun). The data, or their models (based on isotopes from ocean sediment cores) tells them it was cold in the Arctic – but it was warm. What is going wrong, the data or the assumption that the Poles were much as they are today. This sort of thing could be explained away by Continental Drift – but this theory has been replaced by Plate Tectonics (and expanding ocean sea beds). Have a read at the link – he provides lots of other links and tries to make some sense of Axel Heiburg Island.