Issue 93: Tipping Points: Boreal Forests
September 21, 2023
In this week’s issue:
- Boreal forest dieback and permafrost thaw
- Faces in places
- Algae and sediment currents
This is an archived issue. Sign up here to receive the Planet Snapshots newsletter every Thursday morning.
Welcome to the third issue of Tipping Points, a series on the most urgent and concerning climate thresholds. Check out our first issue on Greenland’s ice sheet and second on coral reefs.
Feature Story: Tipping Points: Boreal Forests
It’s Climate Week in NYC — that time when thousands congregate to hash out solutions to labyrinthian climate problems. But what likely won’t garner a roundtable discussion are northern Earth’s dying forests. It doesn’t take a PhD to interpret the smoke signals from the hottest summer on record’s wildfires and declare it a bad sign. Tallying the hectares burned is one thing and determining its impact another. As it stands, our warming world is turning carbon-rich forests to soot and making climate gains moot.
Trace the smoke that colored New York’s skies orange a few months ago and you’ll arrive at the world’s largest biome: the boreal forest, or taiga. It’s a massive band of coniferous trees that rings the globe just below the barren Arctic Circle like a medieval monk’s haircut. And like an aging friar’s hairline, that band is thinning. Fast. But the cause has nothing to do with follicles and everything to do with feedback loops and human folly. And while there’s no magic pill for boreal decline, there are some topical solutions that can help save as many trees as possible.
Refrigerator enthusiasts have long understood that storing things in the cold is best. The 1.5 billion acres of boreal forest spread across the sub-Arctic region stores over 30% of terrestrial biomass, making it the largest carbon storage source on land and helps explain Russia and Canada’s enormous sizes. However, what’s stored can be released. And we’re in deep trouble if Earth’s boreal forests flip from a carbon sink to a source.
There are few mechanisms at play here. The primary threat is a feedback loop that triggers massive consequences: the climate warms, wildfires intensify, more carbon is released, and the climate gets warmer. But there are also more direct drivers too: chainsaws and beetles. The logging industry continues to ax away. And warmer winters are killing less bark beetle larvae, strengthening their numbers and expanding their range into more northern areas. All in all, together these forces threaten to transform these old-growth forests into shrubby grassland.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that the boreal forest tipping point is stacked atop another one: permafrost, AKA the permanently frozen soils in Arctic regions that store twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere now. And since the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else, thawing permafrost is releasing massive amounts of planet-warming gas. In this global game of stabilizing carbon budgets, the balancing act is quickly teetering towards free-fall collapse.
The wildfires raging through Canada’s boreal forests this summer are, in the lightest terms, concerning. They’ve burned an area larger than 104 of the world’s 195 countries and have released 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (more than 100 nations’ combined annual emissions). And new analysis suggests that Canada’s forests have already reached a tipping point, perhaps even as early as the turn of the century.
This is really the crux of the issue. Losing this biome is bad enough, but the carbon released from the forests’ death rattle is utterly terrifying. And with skepticism growing about the effectiveness of carbon offsets, ensuring we protect and regrow the boreal forests we have left is critical. Canada is a great place to start, and the government is utilizing satellite data to understand how this biome is shifting and intervene where necessary to help susceptible areas recover.
The word “boreal” comes from the Greek Boreas, god of the north wind. It’s a fitting name, now more so than ever. For it is wind that’ll either fan the flames over parched forests or be at our backs as we use all available tools to manage this critical tipping point. The choice is largely ours.
What in the World: Pareidolia
Seeing things that aren’t there? Maybe you’re overworked, or maybe it’s just pareidolia. That’s the perception of meaning in random patterns, like seeing sailboats in clouds, biblical figures on toast, or personality traits from horoscopes. From space, we occasionally chance upon faces and figures that jump out from the typical Earthly arrangement. Here’s two fun ones we’ve recently seen, and if you’ve spotted any in your adventuresome scrolls, give our hotline a ring.
Remote Sensations: Currents
Real ducks at the park follow a predictable trail of breadcrumbs, but rubber ducks in the ocean take a more circuitous route. In 1992, a container carrying thousands of yellow ducks and other plastic toys fell overboard in the North Pacific Ocean. In the following years, oceanographers studied their journey over the stormy seas to learn about ocean currents. We advise against adding any more plastic to the oceans, but it turns out there are other proxies that can reveal marine currents. Here’s two we’ve recently spotted painted with sediment and algae.
All imagery Ⓒ 2023 Planet Labs PBC
Editor: Ryder Kimball | Images: Ryder Kimball, Max Borrmann, Julian Peschel, and Maarten Lambrechts
