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    In noisy environs, pied tamarins are using smell more often to communicate

    Native to the Brazilian Amazon, pied tamarins have always used vocal calls to communicate. But noise pollution from car traffic and other human activity are forcing some tamarins to complement those voice calls with smell markings to alert others to dangers, researchers report September 20 in Ethology Ecology & Evolution.

    Most pied tamarins (Saguinus bicolor) live in Manaus, Brazil, inhabiting fragmented patches of forest scattered around urban environments. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, this small, black and whitish-yellow primate is critically endangered.

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    Vocal communication is crucial for pied tamarins’ survival; they use it to alert other individuals to danger — an important feat considering the urban environment surrounding them. “Pied tamarins have 12 different types of vocalization with several uses, from pointing to food and cuddling each other to calling out for some danger,” says Tainara Sobroza, a biologist at the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus.

    The “danger” vocalization is particularly important for these animals, Sobroza says, as many are hit by cars and killed when they cross streets to move between forest patches. “We wanted to understand if this type of vocalization is being affected by the noise of urban environments,” she says.

    Sobroza and colleagues spent about a year observing pied tamarins, which normally wander in groups of less than 10 individuals. Using radio collars, the team tracked nine groups in Manaus for 10 days each from November 2018 to December 2019. While physically following the groups, the researchers measured the loudness of the alpha female’s alert call and visually counted how often individuals rubbed their chest and lower parts on the ground and trees, spreading an odorous, waxy substance to signal which direction they were heading.

    The team thought the tamarins would use fewer vocal callings and more smell-spreading to communicate effectively between groups — but that is not what happened. Estimates of the behaviors suggest tamarins complemented one with the other: They maintained the loudness and quantity of their vocal calls while also marking the terrain with their scents.

    “It is just like being at a noisy party, and you want to call a friend that can’t hear you from the other side of the room,” Sobroza says. “Added to calling him or her, you also usually wave and do arm gestures to call the attention of that person.”

    The new observations bring extra knowledge about the ecology and behavior of this species, says Luciane Lopes de Souza, a biologist at the University of the State of Amazonas in Manaus who did not take part in the study. “It is very interesting to see that pied tamarins can adapt to use [a scent-marking] form of communication, which we see much more frequently in other species such as the squirrel monkey.”

    Human activity is changing the behavior of several species such as birds, spiders and crabs (SN: 6/26/16, SN: 7/16/03). Understanding these changes is crucial if humans want to mitigate their impacts through conservation.

    “I do hope this study goes on, as it is of extreme importance we have research like this running for longer periods,” Souza says. “This way, we can understand annual or seasonal changes in animal behavior and think of evolutionary changes they might be facing.” More

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    New computer analysis hints volcanism killed the dinosaurs, not an asteroid

    For decades, scientists have vigorously debated whether an asteroid strike or massive volcanic eruptions ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Roughly three-quarters of all life on Earth, including all nonbird dinosaurs, went extinct at that time, putting a dramatic end to the Cretaceous Period.

    Now, researchers have devised a new way to identify the true dino killer: Let computers take a crack at it.

    The result of that computational effort suggests that massive bursts of gas produced by the Deccan Traps eruptions were solely capable of causing the extinction event, the team reports in the Sept. 29 Science. Those eruptions, which lasted roughly a million years, spewed massive amounts of gas-ridden lava across what’s now western India.

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    “Rather than come at it from the perspective of ‘let’s blame the volcanoes and explain why’ or ‘let’s blame asteroids and explain why,’” the goal was to have as little human input or bias in the process as possible, says Dartmouth computational geologist Alexander Cox.

    The idea was to work backward using evidence from the scene of the crime. Scientists do have a smoking gun: Cores drilled into deep-ocean sediments contain geologic data pointing to deadly bursts of gas to the atmosphere, particularly planet-warming carbon dioxide and ocean-acidifying sulfur dioxide.

    But such gases could have come from the asteroid strike, as it incinerated rocks on the planet’s surface, Cox says, or from the Deccan Traps eruptions.

    Previous efforts to understand the source of the gases have focused on timing, examining pulses of lava emplacement during the Deccan Traps eruptions, Cox says (SN: 2/21/19). But “we only have best guesses about how much initial gas was in [the lava].” Estimated carbon dioxide concentrations in the lava, for example, vary by an order of magnitude, he says. “So that’s why we approached this from a gas-emissions perspective rather than a lava-flow perspective.”

    Vast hardened lava flows, known as the Deccan Traps, cover much of what’s now western India. The lava is the remnant of a massive volcanic event about 66 million years ago. New computer analyses suggest that gases emitted during this event were enough to shift Earth’s temperature and may have led to the demise of nonbird dinosaurs.Baajhan at English Wikipedia

    To disentangle the relative contributions of each potential culprit, Cox and Dartmouth geologist C. Brenhin Keller used a statistical model called a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. That approach systematically considers the probability of different scenarios of gas emissions from the different sources, converging toward possible solutions as the results of the simulations move closer and closer to geologic observations.

    What made the researchers’ approach particularly powerful is that they harnessed 128 different processors to run scenarios in parallel, Cox says. “All the processors then compared how they’re doing at the end of every model run, like classmates comparing answers.” That parallel computing meant that computations that would otherwise have taken a year took only a few days.

    The observations Cox and Keller used were data collected from three cores drilled into deep-sea sediments, each spanning 67 million to 65 million years ago. In those sediments are foraminifera, ocean-dwelling microorganisms whose carbonate shells contain different isotopes, or forms, of carbon and oxygen. The shells’ chemical makeup records the ocean chemistry at the time of their formation, and so can be used as a proxy to infer past global temperatures as well as how many creatures were thriving in the oceans, and how much carbon was moving between the atmosphere, ocean and land (SN: 1/16/20).

    The computer simulations determined that the amount of gas spewed into the atmosphere from the volcanism alone was enough to account for the changes in temperature and carbon cycling determined from the foraminifera data in the drill cores.

    As for the asteroid strike, which formed the massive Chicxulub crater in what’s now Mexico, it probably did not produce a big spike in carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide, the analysis found (SN: 1/25/17).

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    But many scientists are not convinced that these findings provide the ultimate answer to this long-standing, complex question. “It’s an elegant way to address this problem,” says Sierra Petersen, a geochemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Modeling in this way “gives the freedom to find the consensus solution, taking multiple proxy records into account. However, like any model, output depends on input.”

    Petersen notes that foraminifera shells are not an ideal proxy for ancient temperatures: The oxygen isotope ratios in foraminifera shells can change not only due to temperature but also due to seawater composition. Different temperature proxies would likely lead to different patterns of gas release reproduced in models, Petersen says.

    As for the mass extinction culprit, she adds, “it’s a bit of a leap to say that this study shows the impact didn’t cause the extinction. I think what they show is that the impact was likely not associated with a large [gas] release.” But the asteroid, she says, still could have had other deadly impacts on the planet’s environment.  

    Indeed, “the Chicxulub impact led to many devastating effects beyond the carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions explored in this study,” says Clay Tabor, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

    Those include massive clouds of soot and dust kicked up from pulverized rocks due to the impact, he says. Previous research has suggested this dust may have dimmed the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by as much as 20 percent, inducing a frigid winter that swiftly killed off plants and destroyed habitats (SN: 7/17/20).

    What’s more, the new study suggests that the asteroid impact didn’t have a long-term effect on the planet’s carbon cycle, based on carbon isotope data recorded in the foraminifera shells for the million years after the extinction. But there was an abrupt drop in the abundance of those creatures corresponding to the time of the impact, Tabor says. “The rapid rate of change caused by the Chicxulub impact was likely responsible for its effects on life.”

    “Many geochemical records spanning the [extinction event], as well as this modeling work, cannot capture well the rates of change associated with the Chicxulub impact,” he says. “The impact may have released significantly less CO2 and SO2 than the Deccan Traps, but it did so almost instantaneously.” So even if the asteroid impact released fewer gases overall, Tabor says, the speediness of that release could have been devastating all the same. More

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    ‘The Deepest Map’ explores the thrills — and dangers — of charting the ocean

    The Deepest MapLaura TretheweyHarper Wave, $32

    In 2019, the multimillionaire and explorer Victor Vescovo made headlines when he became the first person to visit the deepest parts of all five of Earth’s oceans. But arguably the real star of the expedition was marine geologist Cassie Bongiovanni, the lead ocean mapper who ensured Vescovo piloted his submersible to the actual deepest depths.

    Today, only 25 percent of the seafloor is well mapped. When Vescovo set out to score his record, the exact deepest location in each ocean was unknown. Bongiovanni, Vescovo and their crew had to chart these regions in detail before each dive.

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    “Traditionally, captains never cared about the seafloor as long as it stayed far enough away from the hulls of their ships,” journalist Laura Trethewey writes in The Deepest Map. The book explores humankind’s quest to map the seafloor, framed around Bongiovanni’s adventures.

    Seafloor topography has been a big concern for militaries patrolling Neptunian frontiers with nuclear submarines and companies facilitating intercontinental communication via subsea cables (SN: 4/10/21, p. 28). In recent decades, seafloor data have become crucial to the deep-sea mining industries searching for metals needed to produce green technology.

    Satellites have revealed many of the knobs and crevices visible in the deep blue of Google Maps. But with that relatively coarse information, entire mountains can be missed. To see the seafloor in high resolution requires a sophisticated sonar system aboard a big ship that sends sound signals from the sea surface into the abyss.

    Mappers like Bongiovanni calculate depth from the time it takes for the signal to travel down and bounce back to the surface. These state-of-the-art sonar systems transform “the satellite-predicted blur into a sharp three-dimensional terrain of ripples, cracks and tears in the seafloor,” Trethewey writes. “The seafloor is ‘heard,’ rather than seen.”

    Through Trethewey’s tale, she twines stories of tagging along with scientists and ocean mappers. That includes her inaugural adventure at sea, which a crew member noted was “pretty rough for a first-timer,” as he and Trethewey clung to a doorframe in near gale force winds. On this cruise aboard research vessel E/V Nautilus, which was surveying a poorly mapped stretch of California’s coast, Trethewey (and readers) are introduced to the art and science of seafloor mapping. On this day, Trethewey learned that mapping is especially difficult — and sometimes impossible — when the ocean is angry.

    Trethewey’s insightful writing helps readers understand just why mapping the ocean — even in shallow coastal waters — is crucial to so many endeavors. She visits a remote Inuit village on the western bank of Canada’s Hudson Bay, where she joins hunters who map ever-changing coastlines for their own safety. Later, she scuba dives with archaeologists in Florida who use underwater maps to explore remnants of early human history that have been submerged for thousands of years.

    A distant, possibly unreachable goal envisions creating a complete map of the entire seafloor by the end of this decade, an effort known as Seabed 2030. Because the oceans are vast and replete with remote and dangerous places that people simply can’t or shouldn’t go, this effort will almost certainly require autonomous surface vehicles armed with sonar. Such devices are already probing the depths and sending back data.

    Staring at computer screens in a sun-filled conference room, Trethewey watches as a drone outfitted with cameras, environmental sensors and a sonar system maps a bit of seafloor off California as she sips her coffee. “The future of ocean mapping weirdly felt a lot like checking social media or doing anything else on your phone these days,” she wryly observes.

    Trethewey’s book is about more than just mapping the oceans. It’s also about what can go wrong when explorers explore. It’s hard to read The Deepest Map without being reminded of the recent implosion of the Titan submersible in the North Atlantic that killed everyone on board in June. Indeed, Trethewey describes how, during Vescovo’s first solo dive, his colleagues endured 25 minutes of apprehension-turned-alarm when they didn’t hear from him.

    She also reminds us how easily exploration can turn into exploitation. In the not-so-distant past, Europeans “discovered” the so-called New World and mapped it, Trethewey writes. Exploitation followed. Scientists and environmentalists alike are now concerned that a full, detailed map of the ocean floor might lead to the destruction of delicate, mostly unknown habitats if deep-sea miners are allowed to extract metals.

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    Trethewey envisions a different outcome. Seabed 2030’s mapping effort may help people see that “the weird, wonderful deep-sea world is not a blank space, another frontier to use up and throw away,” and should be safeguarded for scientists “to uncover our past and protect our future.”

    Buy The Deepest Map from Bookshop.org. Science News is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article. More

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    What’s driving an increasing number of hurricanes to rapidly intensify?

    On the morning of September 5, a loosely swirling system of thunderstorms formed off the western coast of Africa. By September 6, the system had become a Category 1 storm, with maximum winds at least 130 kilometers per hour (80 miles per hour).

    Just 24 hours later, fueled by the record-warm waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Lee whipped itself into a Category 5 monster. In that short time span, its wind speeds doubled, to 260 kilometers per hour (160 miles per hour).

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    As the world’s oceans continue to stockpile heat from global warming, stories of such rapid intensification of tropical cyclones are becoming more commonplace, and not just in the Atlantic.

    “While all eyes are on [Hurricane Lee], [Hurricane Jova] is bombing out in the eastern Pacific,” wrote Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center meteorologist Eric Blake on X, formerly called Twitter, on September 6. “This was just named 36 hours ago and has exploded into a Category 4 hurricane.”

    These storms formed just weeks after Hurricane Idalia, which also rapidly intensified. Its wind speeds cranked up from about 120 kph to 209 kph (or 75 mph to 130 mph) in 24 hours. Shortly afterward, Idalia slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast.

    All of these hurricanes easily met — and some greatly exceeded — the National Hurricane Center’s definition of rapid intensification, in which a storm’s maximum sustained winds jump by at least 56 kph (35 mph) in less than a day. Such storms can leave people little time to prepare, making the hurricanes particularly dangerous to lives and property.

    Here ‘s what to know about such rapidly intensifying storms.

    A warmer ocean and atmosphere can supercharge storms

    The key ingredients to boost a storm’s power quickly are very warm ocean waters, a lot of moisture in the atmosphere and low vertical wind shear, says atmospheric scientist Philip Klotzbach of Colorado State University in Fort Collins (SN: 9/28/18; SN: 9/13/18).

    Vertical wind shear is what happens when winds at different heights in the atmosphere are moving at different speeds and in different directions. Those winds can chip away at a storm as it tries to organize into a tight swirl by pulling heat and moisture away from the storm’s center and sweeping away the upper structure of the storm.

    This year saw the onset of an El Niño phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ocean-climate pattern, a phase that tends to bring more vertical wind shear conditions to the North Atlantic. That means that El Niño years tend to feature fewer Atlantic tropical storms (SN: 5/26/23).

    But so far in 2023, El Niño hasn’t done much to minimize hurricane formation, or dampen the storms’ power. “The first half of the season has not seen the unfavorable upper-level wind conditions in the western Atlantic that are typically observed in an El Niño year,” says Ryan Truchelut, president and chief meteorologist of WeatherTiger, a weather consulting firm based in Tallahassee, Fla. That’s true even in the Caribbean Sea, where El Niño’s shearing power tends to be strongest, Truchelut adds.

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    Generally, there’s more of a contrast in temperature between the Atlantic and Pacific ocean basins during an El Niño year — the weather pattern heats up the eastern tropical Pacific while the Atlantic stays relatively cool.  But 2023 has seen record-breaking ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Gulf of Mexico (SN: 6/15/23). While the El Niño-warmed Pacific is about 1.5 degrees Celsius above normal, parts of the Atlantic are 1 to 3 degrees C above normal.

    “Temperature contrasts drive jets,” Trechelut says, “and the lack of this contrast is likely responsible for the missing shear.”

    The extremely warm waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico set the stage — all the storms needed was a window of time with favorable wind conditions, says John Kaplan, a hurricane modeler with the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, based in Miami.  “What it really comes down to is whether the conditions for rapid intensification are favorable for even a short period of time,” he says. “If there’s a window — even if not a very long one — the system can take advantage of it. That was the case for both Lee and Idalia.”

    More storms are rapidly intensifying as Earth warms

    It certainly feels like most of the hurricanes in recent years are rapidly intensifying (SN: 8/27/20). But is that a true trend? And if it is, is it linked to climate change?

    Studies suggest that it’s not just anecdotal. In August, researchers reported that the yearly number of tropical storms around the globe that rapidly intensified just offshore (within 400 kilometers of land) increased by about three a decade over the last 40 years, from fewer than five per year in the 1980s to about 15 per year by 2020.

    Open-ocean storms, spinning far out in the big blue, showed no discernible trend, the team found. But that’s perhaps not wholly reassuring, as it’s the storms closer to shore that are most threatening to coastal populations. And a 2021 study reported that tropical cyclones have been migrating closer to the coasts since 1982.

    In 2019, another team focused on observational records of wind-speed changes over 24-hour increments. Based on those data, the researchers found that episodes of rapid intensification in tropical storms tripled from 1982 to 2009. Using climate simulations, the team researchers determined that the rapid intensification trend was strongly linked to anthropogenic human-caused climate change.

    Truchelut notes that the same team authored a 2022 study that further supported an upward trend over the last few decades, determining that a larger proportion of tropical cyclones are now undergoing rapid intensification at some point in their life cycle.

    Regional and local weather patterns — such as more frequent La Niña events (the flipside of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation pattern) — “could dampen rapid intensification trends locally,” Truchelut says. “But there is strong objective evidence that anthropogenic global warming is driving increased proportions of tropical cyclones to undergo rapid intensification worldwide.”

    Klotzbach and colleagues, meanwhile, found another fingerprint of climate change in the rapid intensification of cyclones. The researchers reported in 2022 that the increase in global sea surface temperatures correlate well with an increase in the potential intensity of tropical cyclones around the world — essentially, just how strong the winds are capable of becoming — over the last 30 years. That observed increase was particularly apparent for the most monstrous storms — those whose wind speeds increased by a whopping 93 kph (57 mph) in a single day.

    Despite the fury of Lee and Jova, their threat has largely fizzled. Hurricane Lee downgraded to a Category 3 by September 12 and curved northward; however, it’s also tripled in size, threatening Bermuda with tropical storm force winds. Hurricane Jova, meanwhile, ultimately spun harmlessly in the Pacific before weakening.

    But with the hurricane season only half over, there’s still time for all that hot water to fuel the next big ones. More

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    When discussing flora and fauna, don’t forget ‘funga’

    Fungi. They grow between toes, on bread and in the shower. But the organisms also produce food and medicine and act as ecosystem maids by decomposing dead matter — benefits that are sometimes overlooked (SN: 11/17/20). That’s why the Fungi Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to fungi education and conservation, advocates for adding “funga” to the popular phrase “flora and fauna.”

    The mushrooming movement is also backed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which in August called for the addition of “a third ‘F’ — funga — to address the planetary challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.” More than 20 countries already use the term, including Australia, Iceland and Brazil.

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    Historically, fungi have been left out of most conservation discussions and plans, says mycologist Giuliana Furci, founder of the Fungi Foundation, which was created in Chile and is now based in the United States. While flora refers to an area’s plant diversity and fauna its animal diversity, fungi don’t fit into either category. “Fungi didn’t have a way in,” Furci says. “It’s about time they get this recognition.”

    Whether a soil mold or a mushroom on a log, fungi face the same threats as other kingdoms of life, including habitat loss and climate change. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List includes more than 200 species of fungi that are either threatened or endangered. Fungi also form essential relationships with other organisms, like gut bacteria or the roots of plants (SN: 5/25/23). That means it is paramount that fungi are considered in conservation policies, Furci says. She and two other mycologists coined the term funga in 2018 in IMA Fungus. Mycota, the ancient Greek word for mushroom, would have been more accurate, but funga seemed catchier, Furci says.

    The phrase has the potential to take off widely, says mycologist Catherine Gehring of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Using funga along with flora and fauna will be particularly powerful in nonscientist circles where the phrase could encourage interest in fungi among policymakers and the public, she says.

    “[Fungi] are super valuable,” Gehring says. “It’s great to see the movement is gaining traction.” More

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    Some leaves in tropical forests may be getting too hot for photosynthesis

    Like people, leaves have their limits when it comes to heat.

    Scientists first reported in 1864 that the leaves of some plants could survive up to 50° Celsius, only to perish beyond that threshold. More than 150 years later, researchers are making similar findings. In 2021, a study of 147 tropical tree species reported that the average temperature beyond which photosynthesis failed was 46.7° C.

    Now, in the upper canopies of Earth’s tropical forests, roughly 1 in every 10,000 leaves experiences temperatures at least once a year that may be too high for photosynthesis, researchers report August 23 in Nature.

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    That might seem a paltry sum, but a photosynthetic breakdown could harm entire forests if climate change is not halted, the scientists warn. A rise of about 4 degrees C above current temperatures in tropical forests could potentially cause wide swaths of leaves to die en masse, simulations suggest. Still, the researchers acknowledge that the prediction comes with uncertainties.   

    “One small possibility that we’re suggesting … is an incredibly dire tipping point” beyond which tropical forests perish, Christopher Doughty, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, said at an August 21 news briefing. But “there’s a lot we don’t know.”

    When leaves get too hot, their photosynthetic machinery — proteins that convert light energy into sugars — breaks down. Keen to figure out whether tropical forests were approaching such a threshold, Doughty and colleagues obtained data collected by ECOSTRESS, a thermal sensor aboard the International Space Station, which captures vegetation temperatures on Earth’s surface in 70-meter pixels. That’s about the area that two large tropical trees could fill.

    The team compared the data with measurements from devices on the planet’s surface. These included an instrument in the Amazon, mounted 64 meters high on a tower, as well as swarms of sensors taped to the bottoms of leaves in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Panama and Australia.

    The analysis revealed a mosaic of temperatures in forest canopies. During periods when forests were hot and their soils were dry, temperatures across the canopy could reach an average peak of 34° C. But there was variability; some tracts exceeded 40° C.

    The comparison also revealed a detail unseen by ECOSTRESS — a scatter within the mosaic. Individual leaf temperatures varied in single forest tracts, with some leaves reaching temperatures that far exceeded the tract average. About 0.01 percent of the time, upper canopy leaves sweltered at temperatures above the 46.7° C threshold, the team found.

    The researchers also analyzed data from leaf-warming experiments in Brazil, Puerto Rico and Australia. These experiments showed that each degree of ambient warming had a disproportionate impact on leaf temperatures. For example, when Amazon leaves were subjected to an additional 2 degrees C of ambient warming, maximum leaf temperatures rose from 42.8° to 50.9° C.

    The team used the experimental data, along with the satellite and ground-based data, to simulate the future of tropical forests under climate change. Most forests could endure about 4 degrees C of warming above current levels before trees lose all their leaves, and potentially die, the simulations suggest. That amount of warming might be possible by 2100 in a worst-case scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue rising through the century, the researchers say.

    Still, there’s a lot of uncertainty. That’s in part because the adaptive capabilities of different tree species and how the deaths of individual leaves impact a tree’s mortality aren’t well understood.  

    The study may even overestimate vulnerability by “assuming that when leaves hit this critical temperature, they die,” says ecologist Christopher Still of Oregon State University in Corvallis. That’s possible, he says, but we don’t fully understand how long it takes various temperatures to kill different species’ leaves.

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    Predicting the future of these forests will also require more insights into what’s unfolding beneath the canopy, says ecologist Marielle Smith of Bangor University in Wales. “There is still a question mark over the role of small trees and understory leaves, which aren’t going to be as hot.”

    Among tropical forests, the Amazon may be most vulnerable to the type of reckoning predicted by the researchers. “There’s more trees dying [there] now than there were 10 years ago or 20 years ago. We don’t see that in Africa,” Doughty said. That could be because “temperatures are a bit hotter … in the Amazon than in Africa.”

    Some researchers have been warning for years that climate change and deforestation could trigger large parts of the Amazon to transform into savanna and shrubland (SN: 6/16/23).

    “This is a glimpse into a potential tipping point. It’s not saying that the tropical forests are now going to be savannas tomorrow,” study coauthor and ecologist Joshua Fisher of Chapman University in Orange, Calif., said at the briefing. “We can now see this insight … and because we can see that, it means we can act.” More