Entering a Ghost Forest
hello appear as though the skeletons of monsters aiming high. Tall and pale, deprived of their leaves and the majority of their branches, the trees remain in lopsided columns that reach out the extent that the eye can see, grave markers of a backwoods that once flourished close to this North Carolina coastline. "These apparition woodlands are the main edge of environmental change," Emily Bernhardt, a biological system scientist and biogeochemist at Duke University, discloses to The Scientist. They capitulated in moderate movement to pungent water advancing inland as ocean levels rose, and fill in as an update that an unnatural weather change isn't something simply influencing polar bears in far off areas, or something that will occur in the removed future, she says. "It is now occurring, and happening truly quick on the seaside plain of North Carolina." In the decade that Bernhardt has dealt with the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, a couple dozen miles west of...