 People frequently say “green” to mean “environmentally friendly.” But encroaching conifer forests — really big greens — threaten to further spike the far North’s already low-grade fever.
Temperatures in the high Arctic already are climbing “at about twice the global average,” notes F. Stuart Chapin of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The newest data on the advance of northern, or boreal, forests come from the eastern slopes of Siberia’s northern Ural Mountains. Here, north of the Arctic Circle, relatively flat mats of compressed, frozen plant matter — tundra — are the norm. This ecosystem hosts a cover of reflective snow most of the year, a feature that helps maintain the region’s chilly temperatures. Throughout the past century, however, leading edges of conifer forests began creeping some 20 to 60 meters up the mountains, and in some places these forests are now overrunning tundra, scientists report in the July Global Change Biology.
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