![]() The Atlantic Ocean can exceed 35 ppt, and the level of the ocean is rising faster along the eastern seaboard than almost anywhere else on the planet. Although bald cypresses are more salt tolerant than the ashes, oaks, and other species that share their forested wetland home, they can’t survive long with more than two parts per thousand (ppt) salt in their water. These ghost forests are perhaps the clearest signal we have of the inexorable rising tide that is pushing salt water deep into once freshwater ecosystems. Scientists say the United States could lose all of its coastal forested wetlands by 2100. Right: Skeletal cypresses stalk a saltwater marsh that is creeping up the Sampit River in South Carolina, a growing trend along the East Coast as seas rise. Even though bald cypresses are among the most resilient trees on Earth-able to withstand some of the worst conditions nature can muster-cypress forests are now dying in droves along the coastline from Delaware to Texas, leaving bone white skeletons in their wake. While these ancient trees provide a window on our climate past, their siblings closer to the coast are teaching us an equally important lesson about our climate future. We haven’t seen anything like that in the modern era.” A 16th-century megadrought “extended from Mexico to Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and lasted almost 40 years. “The 20th century is not representative of the extremes those trees have endured,” says Stahle, who has cored ancient trees all over the world. These include a drought that may have doomed England’s first foothold in the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh’s famous Lost Colony, in 1587, and a second one in the 16th century that was even worse. Decades-long droughts, as well as wet periods known as pluvials, are clearly written in their rings down to the exact year. The data from their cores and from other bald cypresses in the Southeast form one of the longest and most accurate records of soil moisture in science. That makes it over 2,600 years old, and Stahle has found several others of similar vintage nearby. One cypress he discovered here in 2017 dates to at least 605 B.C., not long after Homer regaled the Greeks with the adventures of Odysseus. The tree Stahle has just cored is barely middle-age. In fact, the bald cypress is the fifth oldest known sexually reproducing tree species on the planet. “This place” is an overlooked patch along North Carolina’s Black River that contains the oldest known trees east of the Rockies. Wildlife abounds in the Audubon Society’s Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, in southwest Florida. “That’s why this place is something special.” “There’s less than a tenth of one percent of the original bottomland cypress swamp left” in the country. But it’s the half-inch sliver close to the bark, from around 1900 to 1935, that Stahle points out.īy the end of that period, roughly 90 percent of the ancient bald cypresses in the U.S. By the time he’s finished extracting the pencil-thin core, Stahle has enough rings to estimate that the gnarled cypress sprang from its sodden bed as the first Crusaders were marching toward Jerusalem about a thousand years ago. Within five inches, Stahle, a dendrochronologist at the University of Arkansas, has reached Columbus’s voyage to the New World. The first inch takes him back to before the First World War, the second to the birth of the United States. Like a woodsy Doctor Who dropped into this southern swamp with a sonic screwdriver, Stahle begins slowly boring through time. On a brisk December day, David Stahle stands atop a ladder leaning against a bald cypress tree as wide as he is tall.
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