Underwater Lumber
The latest issue of Wired features a pretty cool story about a BC company. Triton Logging uses an unmanned submersable the size of a VW bus to harvest tress preserved at the bottom of manmade lakes.
I’d link to the story, but it doesn’t go online until January 31. In the meantime, here’s another piece about Triton, with a couple of photos:
Of course, the lumber provided by these trees (which are technically dead) is by no means what you’d pick up at Home Depot for a little weekend project. While the cost of cutting submerged trees runs about the same as cutting live ones on dry land, the timber that is manufactured sells for about three times as much! Because it is technically old-growth timber, it is denser and more stable than your typical lumber.
The market is apparently enormous–some estimates put it as high as $50 billion. And it’s guilt-free logging–the logs are just rotting at the bottom of lakes anyway.
