Super Dedicated Slabber for this one!

[Grande Dog]

Howdy,

I had this sent to me. It's a 3000 year old swamp Kauri.

Regards
Gregg

 

[GrantD]

I would like to see how they got it loaded on the lowboy, surely not with just the trackhoe in the background!

 

[buzz sawyer]

Thanks Gregg. That's some big wood!

 

[Grande Dog]

Howdy,
They said it took 2 D 85's, and a 30 ton Digger.
Regards
Gregg

 

[Jim Timber]

Wow!

Definitely want to see how this one looks inside.

 

[yarightdawg]

Yes keep us updated

 

[BigOakAdot]

Looks absolutely insane. What did that run you?

 

[Dave Boyt]

I'd like to see a photo of the sawmill that mills it! Any idea what the plans are?

 

[Rookie1]

Cool.

 

[mdavlee]

That's a huge log. Is that in Australia?

 

[Grande Dog]

I'd like to see a photo of the sawmill that mills it! Any idea what the plans are?

Howdy,
I'm not sure about the plans. I think they would be able to whittle it up with one of these. It'll do a 9' wide cut. I'll try to keep people posted as things progress.
Regards
Gregg

 

[Yellowbeard]

I don't even know what to say about that. Trying to think what you would do with a slab of that. Make a table for knights to sit at, maybe?

 

[Grande Dog]

Howdy,
I've seen some of those live edge corporate boardroom tables that would tear the wallet pocket right off your pants.
Regards
Gregg

 

[cityslicker]

It almost looks like they dug a pit for the lowboy to sit in so its deck would be at ground level to load. More pics please!!!!!!

 

[KiwiBro]

You could easily add a zero to the age in some cases. Some of them are too old to be accurately dated, the tests just come back "older than 40 000 years" or something like that.
Biggest one I am aware of was pulled from a job I was cutting the remnants up for firewood. They got something like 45m3 (about 19,000bdf) of milled lumber from it.

Much of this wood is still in perfect condition. And Kauri is known for it's utterly amazing whitebait figure and glow. It's quite mesmerising for us wood lovers. Super easy to work with too.

Opinion on what catastrophic event or events flattened these massive forests all those years ago is still divided. It's not uncommon for the logs to all be laying the same way. Some people think massive tsunami that swept right over them. Another is a super-volcanic boom from an eruption. We have a super volcano here in NZ called the Taupo Volcano that has been erupting ever now and then since about 300,000 years ago (but only about 4 or 5, I can't recall, eruptions over that period). About 25,000 years ago it erupted, spewing over 1,000 cubic kilometres which is about 240 cubic miles, of rock and debris. That's a pretty big blow by anyone's standards.

I've got a few slabs of some wonderful ancient Kauri, drying in my racks. No idea what to make from them yet.

Virtually no really big Kauri trees left in NZ now (only grew in the North and was almost wiped out by early settlers), and the big ones are protected (by law) now. Here's a few shots I took of one a few years ago;



In many places where these swamp Kauri logs are found, they are only a few feet under the ground. Towards the end of a dry Summer, people can charter a small plane and fly over known hotspots that have been cleared a long time ago for farmland and you can see where the logs are because the grass is drier or dead because the large logs create a barrier between the grass and moisture. It's quite a remarkable demarcation in some cases.

But the value of these logs is so high and demand from mainly China but also to a much lesser extent USA and even lesser still from locals here in NZ, means the easy places to find them are all but gone and the only places left are the harder to access and more costly to extract areas. The value is so high, people are breaking the law by draining or wrecking protected wetlands to pull the kauri out. Been some high profile prosecutions and fines lately and even some alleged mafia style hits or leaning on people testifying against such extractions. In one case I recall the guy was driving on his way to court and was accosted in his car and pretty badly hurt:
http://tvnz.co.nz/sunday-news/bleach-attack-leaves-victim-without-job-5947970

Other spots to find Kauri and other Native NZ timber logs (but not swamp logs as such more early settler saw logs) is in the tributaries and lakes once used to transport logs to mills. Some logs sank, others fell off barges in bad weather, some washed down stream and abandoned or lost in storms, etc. In the North we have a massive harbour called the Kaipara harbour. It covers something like 900 square kilometres at high tide, so about 300 square miles. People use to pull out sunk logs embedded in the sea floor a fair bit a few decades ago, but depending on the species, the resulting wood could look quite different - nowhere near as good - because of the years soaked in sea water.

The ones they have been pulling out of the South Island fresh water lakes don't suffer the same degrading fate and the wood appearance is still vibrant. We have a wonderful and long-running TV series here called Country Calendar which records what many in rural NZ are up to. They had a show on pulling logs out of Lake Brunner. Can't find the video but here is a quick blurb about it:
http://tvnz.co.nz/country-calendar/sunken-treasure-1077034

 

[BigOakAdot]

It's hard for me to even imagine where a tree of that size and magnitude comes from. I've seen pics from the early 1900s of trees that compare to that size but that's on another level...

 

[Yellowbeard]

You could easily add a zero to the age in some cases. Some of them are too old to be accurately dated, the tests just come back "older than 40 000 years" or something like that.
Biggest one I am aware of was pulled from a job I was cutting the remnants up for firewood. They got something like 30m3 (over 12,000bdf) of milled lumber from it.

Much of this wood is still in perfect condition. And Kauri is known for it's utterly amazing whitebait figure and glow. It's quite mesmerising for us wood lovers. Super easy to work with too.

Opinion on what catastrophic event or events flattened these massive forests all those years ago is still divided. It's not uncommon for the logs to all be laying the same way. Some people think massive tsunami that swept right over them. Another is a super-volcanic boom from an eruption. We have a super volcano here in NZ called the Taupo Volcano that has been erupting ever now and then since about 300,000 years ago (but only about 4 or 5, I can't recall, eruptions over that period). About 25,000 years ago it erupted, spewing over 1,000 cubic kilometres which is about 240 cubic miles, of rock and debris. That's a pretty big blow by anyone's standards.

I'm going to guess (but it's a fairly educated guess) that the reason the dates are hard to get to is because they are using radio-carbon dating (Carbon-14) to make those measurements. That would be especially true if the figure you used re: 40k years is an actual number and not a made up figure because C-14 dating can only give dates back to about 40k years (well, I am seeing 58k now that I looked it up but when I was in school 40k was an oft-quoted figure - definitely possible that techniques have improved in the last 20 years).

As for those lying all the same direction: If it were a local eruption then one could probably tell if it were a volcano based on presence or absence of ash. That might help get a better date in some cases as well, though C-14 is about the shortest time-period dating method AFAIK. If it were a tsunami, presence of sea-life fossils associated with the trees would be useful but I would rate it as somewhat unlikely for anyone to find such a thing. If C-14 were used in conjunction with dendro-chronology, someone might get a better idea but it would take quite a bit of work. I wonder if any dendro-chronologists are getting looks at ancient wood like this. If not, it's too bad as that could be some prime data, especially in trees of this size which, I imagine lived a very long time and so could be used to create some really long records.

Would love to have a slab of it. You Kiwis sure do have some awesome stuff down there.

 

[KiwiBro]

Quite a bit of friction between scientists and extractors/millers in some places at some times. The scientists just can't get to the extracted wood in time to take good samples, and that data is lost. But there has been some great work in this area. I can't recall the TV show but it followed a group doing their research and highlighted what they had learned about climate changes over the last 30,000 years in particular.

Here's a link I found, but there was some more recent research that I can't find info on.

http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/News...rchive/NZ-swamp-kauri-reveals-climate-secrets

We have a tree ring lab in Auckland of some repute:
http://web.env.auckland.ac.nz/our_research/treeringlab/aboutus.html