From garbage tip to wildlife haven - new theory for Everglades
tree islands Today the tree-islands of Florida's Everglades are
natural havens for the some of the most spectacular of the
swampland's denizens - alligators, panthers and rare birds. But
five millenia ago, they may have been home to a very different
community, as sites where prehistoric humans settled - and
dumped their garbage. That's the story being coaxed from the
analysis of rocks and soil sampled from some of the tree-islands
by a team from Montreal's McGill University. Tree-islands have
long been a curiosity of the Everglades, where they punctuate
the flat marshy landscape as circular areas of raise ground.
Here trees have taken root, alligators nest and a diverse range
of other wildlife take refuge. Previous research has found that
the islands owe much of their long-term resilience to a layer of
hardened limy rock. It was initially thought that the islands
simply formed on natural protrusions of this carbonate bedrock.
Now, excavation and a