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Unusual and Unpleasant Unearthed by Oregon Coast Surf

4,000-year-old stumps are beginning to appear south of Newport (photo Guy DiTorrice)

(Newport, Oregon) – The crazy tales are beginning to come in about what washed in with the recent massive storm surges on the Oregon coast. But more striking is what has been uncovered.

Lots of wave action creates a kind of scouring on the beaches, where sand is skimmed out and the sand levels sometimes lessen dramatically. It is estimated sands on the north coast have been lowered by as much as four feet since the fall.

This annual scouring of sand has already unearthed 4,000-year-old stumps in the Cape Lookout area. A similar stretch of stumps about the same age are constantly visible at Neskowin, but more of them are currently showing.

Stumps and root systems in Newport as they appeared in 2007

Such so-called “ghost forests” are showing up just south of Newport, near Waldport, on a beach one mile north of Lost Creek State Park. Photographs taken by Newport’s Guy DiTorrice show the area – called Thiel Creek – with large, rock-like structures jutting out of the sand at odd angles.

These are not basalt, and they feel like very wet wood to the touch.

These ghost forests are about 4,000 years old, and the remnants of a patch of trees that was swallowed by sand, mud or the sea rather abruptly, usually over a period of years, as some change in the landscape allowed this to happen. This killed the forest, but also preserved the trees in the salt water, instead of decaying as they normally would out in the open.

Thiel Creek stumps (photo Guy DiTorrice)

Often, these structures have been sawed down to the root systems, usually by early white pioneers to the area.

There are also similar structures buried beneath the sand at Newport’s Moolack and Beverly beaches, which have not yet been exposed this year. They too are believed to be 4,000 years old.

Another beach expert in Newport, Terry Morse, has been keeping a close eye on the ocean and has seen a bevy of odds and ends wash up recently.

Dunes on the north coast have eroded enough to show roots of dunegrass (photo Tiffany Boothe, Seaside Aquarium)

One storm apparently dragged in a seal carcass that was badly decayed – or so Morse thought. He called it a “bag of bones.”

He passed on a photo to Jim Rice, head of the Marine Mammal Stranding for the central Oregon coast, who in turn theorized it may not have been washed up at all, but something a little more grisly.

“These remains appear to be from a young northern elephant seal,” Rice said in an email to Morse. “Last summer I performed necropsies on a few elephant seals in that area and buried their remains. It's possible that the recent high tides have uncovered this carcass from its burial spot.”

On the north coast, the big, fluffy sand dunes have been eroded in some interesting ways. Big tides have been taking a bite out of those for weeks now, with dunegrass roots now dangling from curved slices ripped from the dunes. The Seaside Aquarium's Tiffany Boothe said such scenes are common all over the north coast at the moment.

In Newport, storm surges and immense wave action from this weekend dug out chunks of the cliffs there, with as much as six feet of roadway falling away in some spots.

DiTorrice took some photos for BeachConnection.net, showing some spectacular erosion that ate away at cliffs about 60 feet high, carving so thoroughly in some spots that large chunks of pavement by the side of Highway 101 fell to the beach. See more here.

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