If you want to see a 4,000-yaer-old forest, go to the Oregon coast. Oh, you won’t see an actual forest on the beaches between Lincoln City and Newport. You’ll see what look like pontoons or docks, stuck in the sand. But geologists think that these are the remnants of coastal forests that were inundated by cataclysmic tsunamis and perhaps earthquakes as well, which sunk the coastline in one massive cratering between 1,500 and 4,000 years ago. What’s left are stumps of trees, gnarled and weather-beaten, and they wouldn’t exist at all had they not been buried in sand for thousands of years, unearthed at last by the relentlessness of the Pacific.

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