For most Suffolk residents, the Great Dismal Swamp is an unknown territory driven past on the way to work or every once in a while — a place that billows copious amounts of smoke for weeks on end during wildfires.

But it’s an outdoor classroom for professors and students from universities, whose studies and discoveries are writing new chapters in the storied swamp’s known history, perhaps even revising previous ones.

On Wednesday, a team from Christopher Newport University’s Center for Wetland Conservation and university officials journeyed into the burn scar from 2011’s Lateral West Fire.

They wanted to look at what the 6,574-acre, 111-day fire did to study plots after it scrubbed the third year of a three-year investigation into Atlantic white cedar.

This tree species was once found throughout the swamp, center director Rob Atkinson said. But 2011’s fire, on the heels of another fire in 2008 and an earlier hurricane, destroyed most remaining pure stands.

Feeding on the swamp’s abundant peat — which is decomposed plant matter — the latest fire is also thought to have wiped out the remnant seeds by which tree stands can bounce back after such events.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge included the largest remaining stands of the globally rare Atlantic white cedar up until September 2003, when Hurricane Isabel destroyed about 3,000 acres.

Traveling in a minibus, Atkinson, Provost Mark Padilla, College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences Dean David Doughty, Associate Provost Bobbye Bartels and students Justin Weiser, Shawn Wurst, Kristina Kowalski and Brian McNure entered the burn scar along Corapeake Ditch, one of the swamp’s 51 major ditches.

It was an experience more akin to visiting another planet than most others available on this one — they were met with a landscape Padilla described as “like a wasteland.”

On one side of the ditch, which burned both in 2011 and 2008, countless charred stumps rose from sooty water five miles across to the edge of Lake Drummond.

On the other side, to the west, a watery wasteland appeared slightly less devastated, having been spared by the earlier fire.

While refuge managers are planning to use topography contour mapping technology to learn more accurately how much peat was lost in the Lateral West Fire, exposed roots of blackened trees show it was between three and five feet.

Another reason for Wednesday’s expedition, Atkinson explained, was to see how waterlogged the swamp still remains after 2011’s Hurricane Irene.

When things dry out enough, graduate student John Miller hopes to recover logs exposed by the fire, which consumed an estimated 3,000-year accumulation of peat.

Atkinson said that once the water subsides, only a small window of opportunity would exist to recover the logs before nature reclaims them in the next growing season.

“It’s interesting to see the large supply of logs,” he said. “The water should be gone in another month, and that’s when we should be able to go in.”

Currently, the oldest log from the swamp to have been studied is 80. When the water subsides, Atkinson said, they should be able to reach 3,800- to 6,000-year-old logs.

It is hoped analysis of the preserved logs will reveal details of what the swamp was like long before it was drained for logging in the 18th and 19th centuries—– and for that matter before Lake Drummond’s discovery in 1665 — providing insights for future refuge management practices.

Atkinson believes 8,000 acres of mixed cedar within the swamp may be made into pure stands. “This is the best hope” for resurrecting the cedars, he said.

Folks from Old Dominion University, North Carolina State University and American University are also known to venture into the swamp, but CNU is believed to be the most active institution there.

“People think that the wilderness is some far-off desolate place,” said Kowalski, whose current project is analyzing soil taken from the swamp before the most recent fire.

“It’s amazing how many people who grow up out here don’t realize how close the swamp is and what’s out there.”

Atkinson’s immersion in the refuge’s swamp environment began in 1995, when it was used as a reference point in a U.S. Air Force-funded study by one of his graduate students.

“I arrived in 1995 never having heard of Atlantic white cedar,” he said. “I’ve been here since then.”