The South Carolina Forest That Looks Like Melted Ice Cream

WITH ITS SOMETIMES-SWAMPY LANDSCAPE STIPPLED with soaring cypresses, Congaree National Park in central South Carolina looks like a prehistoric diorama. And occasionally it also resembles a Lisa Frank folder come to life. When conditions are right, standing water appears orangey, blue, and pinky-red—hues usually reserved for garish school supplies or swirls of melted sherbert on a hot day.

The sheen comes from oil, but isn’t the product of a spill or other industrial mess-up. Rather, the “oil-slick sheen” comes from Taxodium—the genus of water-loving conifers in the cypress family—which produce massive quantities of resin and oils, says Az Klymiuk, collections manager of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago. The iridescence comes from oils freed up through decay, they say, that then float and coat the surface.

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