As climate change decimates forests in places like Europe and North America, white spruces are showing up where trees haven’t grown for a thousand years.
According to a new study conducted in Alaska and published in the journal Nature on August 10, 2022, young white spruce trees are now growing in the tundra, where climate scientists did not expect them to be for another hundred years or more.
The white spruce trees in this study are Picea glauca, native to most of Canada and Alaska with limited populations in the northeastern United States. White spruce is the most valuable component of Alaska’s interior boreal (taiga) forests that stretch from the Kenai Peninsula across the Alaska Range to the southern slopes of the Brooks Range including the drainages of the Yukon, Kuskokwim, and Copper River systems.
The climate crisis is not only changing global heating but the composition of soils in our forests, making it more difficult for trees to get the right nutrients and allowing them to become far less resilient to diseases.
Added to the mix are the wildfires occurring around the globe as monster droughts make forests fire traps and dry up water supplies, reports The Guardian. “It’s like humans have lit a match and we are now seeing the result of that,” said Roman Dial, a biologist at Alaska Pacific University.
The study came about when biologist Roman Dial of Alaska Pacific University noticed the shadows of what appeared to be spruce trees while browsing satellite imagery of the Arctic tundra of northern Alaska.
Dial and his colleagues had to hike for five days to see them. “It was shocking to see trees there. No one knew about them, but they were young and growing fast,” Dial recounted, per the Guardian.
The group of researchers from Alaska Pacific University, University of Alaska Anchorage, Amherst College, and Northern Arizona University, discovered that a patch of white spruce trees in northwest Alaska had “hopped” north into an area of the Arctic tundra that hasn’t had such trees in millennia.
These new findings underscore new research published on August 11, 2022, that shows scientists underestimated the speed at which the Arctic is melting. It is warming up four times faster than the rest of the world, transforming ecosystems, upending migratory patterns of animals, releasing and redistributing carbon—and creating the environmental conditions for conifers to grow.
Dial and his associates estimate the spruce are advancing north at a rate of around 2.5 miles a year, aided by warming temperatures and changes to snow and wind patterns influenced by the shrinkage of sea ice in the region.
“It was shocking to see trees there. No one knew about them but they were young and growing fast,” said Dial, who first spotted the shadows of the trees on satellite imagery and then took a single-engine plane journey, followed by a five-day hike, to find and study the advancing forest.
“The trees basically hopped over the mountains into the tundra. Going by climate models, this wasn’t supposed to happen for a hundred years or more. And yet it’s happening now.”
It’s also possible tree seedlings have taken root in other remote, inaccessible areas of the tundra that scientists have not yet discovered, the authors said, reports Quartz.
There is a big downside to all this. As white spruce and others gradually migrate northward, they leave behind an increasingly barren biome, where dead trees invite wildfire and release additional carbon into the atmosphere.
