Abstract
During one of the glacial intervals of the late Pleistocene approximately 70.000 years ago, the planet experienced lower atmospheric temperatures and lower sea levels, resulting in the exposure expose coastal continental shelves and the movement and establishment of terrestrial plant species in these areas. Although Holocene marine transgression has now submerged these paleocoastal sites, an area off the southeastern United States coast in the northern Gulf of Mexico (NGOM) contains wood found to be radiocarbon dead that has been exposed on the ocean floor and recovered from sediment cores. This underwater ecosystem that once grew on the exposed NGOM continental shelf during the late Pleistocene has been the subject of ongoing paleoenvironmental and geophysical research since its discovery in 2010. This thesis seeks to explore interconnecting perspectives regarding this late Pleistocene coastal ecosystem by weaving, extending, and merging approaches across geographic boundaries to generate a distinctly transdisciplinary study of a conventionally physical geographic subject. Wood anatomy analysis indicates that throughout late Pleistocene sea level lowstands, the NGOM exposed continental shelf functioned as a glacial refugia to bald cypress, Atlantic white cedar, and southern pine tree species. Spatial concentrations and shared depth-age ranges of the identified wood specimens further suggest that these species comprised localized and coeval wetland-forest ecosystems to create a more heterogeneous NGOM paleocoastal landscape. Extending beyond the technical microanatomical analysis, the visualizations of ancient wood bodies become [re]presented through photographic, lace-knit, and print forms in the incorporation of multimodal arts-based research methods. The visualizations intend to explore the renderings of an ancient wood body across spatial, temporal, and climatic scales. Furthermore, these renderings probe the parallel precarities both tree and (our queer trans) human lives face in changing climatic regimes and ecologies. By interconnecting systemic approaches and scientific modes of inquiry with emergent queer trans transgressions and creative moves throughout the ‘underwater forest’ world, the moves towards a transdisciplinary geographic praxis that aligns physical science with creative, multimodal, queer-trans-feminist approaches to dendrochronology, paleoecology, and climate change.