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    This ‘thermal cloak’ keeps spaces from getting either too hot or cold

    If you’ve ever burned your hands on a car steering wheel, you know how hot the inside of a car can get on a summer day. But a new fabric could one day help cars and other objects stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

    Researchers created a prototype of the fabric, which acts as a “thermal cloak” that keeps the space underneath it from getting too hot or too cold. The cloak, described in the July 11 Device, doesn’t require an external power source, which could reduce energy consumption associated with heating and cooling (SN: 9/28/18).

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    Globally, heating and cooling make up 38 percent of energy use in buildings and 12 percent of total energy consumption. Materials like this thermal cloak could help keep us comfortable during heat waves while reducing carbon dioxide emissions associated with electricity used in temperature control, says Aaswath Raman, an applied physicist at UCLA who was not involved in the study.

    In the new study, Kehang Cui, an engineer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and colleagues built the cloak using two layers. The outer layer is made of white silica fibers that reflect visible light, coated with hexagonal boron nitride, a ceramic material that reflects ultraviolet light and helps dissipate heat. Together, the silica fibers and boron nitride reflect 96 percent of the sunlight that hits the fabric. At the same time, the outer layer absorbs heat from the surrounding area and emits that energy as infrared light, which also lowers the temperature under the cloak through a process called radiative cooling.

    Though the outer layer keeps the space under the cloak cooler for longer than an uncovered area, the cloaked space slowly warms up throughout the day. The inner layer, made of aluminum foil, keeps the space warm at night by trapping some of that heat inside, similar to an insulating survival blanket.

    The researchers tested the cloak material’s durability under several extreme conditions. They baked the fabric at 800° Celsius, just about hot enough to melt table salt. They also exposed it to extreme cold by dunking it in liquid nitrogen, subjected it to the same amount of vibration as a rocket launch, doused it in acid and blasted it with fire from a butane torch — all with virtually no changes to the material’s structure or performance. This extreme durability might lend itself to use in spacecraft or extraterrestrial environments, the team says.

    To see the fabric in action, Cui and colleagues built a full-size prototype cloak and tested it on an electric car. On a summer day in Shanghai, the cloak kept the car at about 23° C — up to 8 degrees C lower than the outside temperature and 28 degrees C lower than the inside of an uncloaked car. The cloak also kept the car about 5 degrees C warmer than the outside air on a winter night.

    The cloak “definitely shows the capability of saving energy, but the next step is that we want to demonstrate it in even larger-scale field tests [such as rooftops] to see the impact on our daily lives,” Cui says. More

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    Antarctic sea ice has been hitting record lows for most of this year

    Something strange is happening to the Antarctic’s sea ice. The areal expanse of floating ice fringing the continent is not only at a record low for this time of year — surpassing a record just set in 2022 — but ice extent has been hitting record lows throughout the year.

    “What’s happened here is unlike the Arctic sea ice expanse,” says Mark Serreze, a climate scientist and the director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC, in Boulder, Colo. We’ve come to expect a dramatic decline in sea ice at Earth’s other pole, he says (SN: 9/25/19). “Not much has happened to Antarctica’s sea ice until the last few years. But it’s just plummeted.”

    NSIDC uses satellite-gleaned data, collected daily, to keep an eye on the spread of sea ice at both poles. Throughout most of 2023, the ring of sea ice around Antarctica has repeatedly set new record lows, staying well below the average extent from 1981 to 2010. On February 21 — the height of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer — the sea ice expanse hit an all-time low since record-keeping began in 1978, of 1.79 million square kilometers. That’s 130,000 square kilometers — about the size of the state of New York — smaller than the previous recorded minimum, reached on February 25, 2022.

    Subpar sea ice

    The amount of ocean around Antarctica covered in sea ice in 2023 (red) has stayed well below the average from 1981 to 2010 (black). Sea ice expanse hit a record low in late February — surpassing a record set just in 2022 (blue). The sea ice expanse for every year from 1981 to 2021 is shown in gray.

    Even as the Southern Hemisphere shifted into winter, Antarctic sea ice remained at record low levels. On June 27, the ice was dotted across about 11.7 million square kilometers of ocean. That’s about 2.6 million square kilometers below the 1981–2010 average, and about 1.2 million square kilometers below the previous lowest extent on record for June 27, set in 2022.

    Unlike Arctic ice, whose dwindling is known to be closely tied to global warming, it’s been harder to parse the reasons for changes in Antarctic sea ice extent. That difficulty has made it unclear whether changes are the result of natural variability or whether “something big has changed,” Serreze says.

    As of June 28, the sea ice surrounding Antarctica, as measured by satellite, covered a smaller area of ocean than the average extent from 1981 to 2010 for this time of year. Yellow lines and dots represent missing satellite data.U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center

    The last few years have given scientists pause (SN: 6/27/17). “We’re kind of dropping off an edge,” Serreze says. It’s not yet clear whether this year’s extent is part of a larger trend, he notes. But “the longer that persists, the more likely it is that something big is happening.”

    The Arctic and the Antarctic regions are polar opposites, so to speak, in their geographic setting. Ice in the Arctic Ocean is confined to a relatively small body of water ringed by land. The Antarctic, by contrast, is a landmass surrounded by ocean, which means the sea ice around the continent is much more mobile than up north, with a larger seasonal range as it expands in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter and shrinks in summer. Climate simulations have, accordingly, consistently predicted that the Arctic would show bigger sea ice losses as the planet warms, at least at first, while Antarctica would be slower to respond.

    As to why the Antarctic ice has tracked so low this year there are a few possible culprits. Regional climate patterns — particularly an air pressure pattern known as the Southern Annular Mode that shifts the direction of winds blowing around the continent — can pack or diffuse the sea ice cover around Antarctica. And other regional patterns, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, can affect both ocean and air circulation in the southern high latitudes.

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    Right now, scientists are concerned most with what lies beneath the ice (SN: 12/13/21). “There’s growing evidence that there has been some kind of change in ocean circulation that is bringing more heat” to the region, which affects the ice cover, Serreze says. “There are a bunch of people looking into this; we’re really blitzing to get the data. We need to understand what the heck is going on in the ocean.” More

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    Dust from a shrinking Great Salt Lake may be accelerating Utah’s snowmelt

    Utah’s trademarked “greatest snow on earth” may be getting dirtier — and melting faster — due in part to dust blowing off newly exposed lakebed from the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

    Snow in the Wasatch Mountains above Salt Lake City had more dust deposited on it in 2022 than in any year since observations began in 2009, researchers report in the June Environmental Research Letters. The dust accumulation caused snow to disappear 17 days earlier than if the snow had been clean.

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    An earlier, faster snowmelt may alter the water supply for the 1.2 million people who live in the region, as well as ecosystems downstream, says McKenzie Skiles, a snow hydrologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. It also affects the region’s ski areas, which contribute more than $1.5 billion per year to the local economy.

    In arid parts of the western United States, snow acts as a natural reservoir. More than half the municipal water in Salt Lake City comes from four streams that drain snow out of the Wasatch Mountains. But current forecasting tools don’t account for the impact of dust, Skiles says, which absorbs sunlight, speeding up snowmelt. That means people can’t accurately predict when snow runoff will happen so they can use water efficiently.

    As an avid skier, Skiles noticed the slopes near Salt Lake City looked especially dirty in 2022. So she and colleagues investigated whether the increase in dust was related to consecutive years of record-low water in the Great Salt Lake (SN: 4/17/23).

    The team collected snow samples from a plot adjacent to Alta Ski Resort and found that storms deposited substantial amounts of dust 16 times during the 2022 snowmelt season. After calculating where the dust came from during each storm based on wind direction and atmospheric conditions, the team found that Great Salt Lake contributed nearly a quarter of the total dust to the study site. It also released the most dust relative to the lake’s exposed surface area. This was surprising, Skiles says, because the Great Salt Lake’s dry lakebed is tiny compared with the exposed surfaces of neighboring dust sources, such as the much bigger West Desert, a dry landscape west of Great Salt Lake. The West Desert contributed about of half the dust, while other dried-up lakebeds and deserts, some as far away as Idaho and Nevada, delivered the rest.

    A record amount of dust coated snow at the Atwater Study Plot near Alta, Utah, in spring of 2022. The dust speeded up snowmelt by 17 days.Otto Lang

    “The future of Utah is going to be drier,” says Patrick Belmont, a hydrologist at Utah State University in Logan who was not part of the study. Earlier snowmelt causes the landscape to dry out faster, creating “a feedback loop that’s hard to break out of,” he explains. As Great Salt Lake shrinks and deposits more dust on the mountains, there’s less water available to refill the lake during the summer, which in turn exposes a larger dust source as the shoreline recedes.

    A smaller lake also means less winter snow, Belmont says, as evaporation from Great Salt Lake contributes up to 10 percent of the snowpack in the Wasatch range. “Unless we make some big policy changes, we should expect to see a much lower Great Salt Lake, and it’s very possible that we lose the lake altogether.”

    Skiles and her colleagues plan to keep monitoring the snowpack and to use remote sensing to see if dust is impacting snow across all of the mountains that drain into the Great Salt Lake. “We need more years of data to understand if this is the new normal,” she says. More

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    Irrigation may be shifting Earth’s rotational axis

    Runoff from irrigation has moved so much water from land to sea that Earth’s rotation might have measurably shifted.

    Computer simulations suggest that from 1993 through 2010, irrigation alone nudged the North Pole by about 78 centimeters, researchers reported in the June 28 Geophysical Research Letters. That would make irrigation the second largest contributor to polar drift after the ongoing rebound of Earth’s surface following the retreat of glaciers since the last ice age.

    Researchers have long known that the North Pole wanders across the Arctic seascape in a circle a few meters in diameter. Seasonal weather patterns cause part of this cyclical drift, and long-term variations in the temperature and salinity of ocean water help drive a 14-month-long oscillation dubbed the Chandler wobble (SN: 4/15/03).

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    But those repeated vacillations aren’t the only things that move the pole around, says Clark Wilson, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin. There is also a subtler, noncyclic polar drift caused by the movement of land-based water to the sea from melting glaciers worldwide and from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, he says.

    Runoff from irrigation also plays a role — and a surprisingly large one at that.

    In the first study to try and tease out the contributions of these water movements, Wilson and colleagues used computer simulations to assess how the impoundment of water behind dams, glacial melt, irrigation and several other factors might affect polar drift. Previous studies have suggested that irrigation shifted about 2 trillion metric tons of water from land-based aquifers to the oceans from 1993 through 2010 — enough to raise global sea level more than 6 millimeters.

    Although seemingly minuscule, that redistribution of water was enough to shift the North Pole just over four centimeters each year on average during that period, the team found.

    When all sources of water movement are considered — including the runoff of meltwater from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets — the North Pole drifted about 1.6 meters toward the east coast of Greenland in that time. The impact of irrigation was mostly to nudge the pole generally east of where it would have gone otherwise, the team found. Without irrigation, the pole would have drifted nearly the same amount, but toward the center of Greenland instead.

    Unlike other drivers that vary over the course of a year, Wilson says, the polar drift due to irrigation is permanent and probably growing each year.

    “The team’s findings all make sense,” says Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “It’s important to realize that water is heavy, and when it moves around it’s going to affect Earth’s rotation.”

    Besides shifting the North Pole, large-scale irrigation can also affect local and regional climates. Studies have shown that irrigation cools temperatures and boosts humidity in California’s Central Valley, as well as increasing rainfall in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest and enhancing flow volumes in the Colorado River (SN: 1/22/13). More

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    Why is the North Atlantic breaking heat records?

    In the past few weeks, sea-surface temperatures in some parts of the North Atlantic Ocean have soared to record heights.

    The anomalous warming is occurring in a large swath stretching almost one-third of the way across the Atlantic westward from the northwestern coast of Africa. Satellite data reveal that some surface waters in the area are almost 4 degrees Celsius (about 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal for this time of the year, says Brian McNoldy, a meteorologist at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.

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    “There’s been record-breaking warmth since March, but even more so now,” he says.

    On June 10, for instance, the average sea-surface temperature for the portion of the Atlantic that stretches from the equator to 60 degrees north — up to southern Norway, southern Greenland and the central portions of Canada’s Hudson Bay — was 22.7° C (nearly 73° F). That’s about 1 degree C higher than the average recorded from 1991 through 2020, McNoldy notes. The previous record for the same date, 22.1° C, occurred in 2010.

    Hot Atlantic

    Sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic in 2023 (red) have been breaking daily records since March. In this plot, the 1982–2022 daily mean temperatures have been subtracted from this year’s temperatures as well of those from 1982 to 2022 (gray).

    This year’s warmer-than-normal waters might help strengthen storms that form in the eastern Atlantic and eventually spawn hurricanes, scientists say.

    What’s causing the unusual warm-up isn’t clear. But here’s a rundown of several factors that might be at play.

    A dearth of Sahara dust

    Occasionally, vast swathes of desert dust from the Sahara waft across the ocean. They are carried by winds stirred up by a semipermanent high-pressure system dubbed the “Azores high” due to its proximity to those islands.

    But lately, the Azores high has weakened and shifted southwest away from Africa. So those winds that typically pick up and transport Saharan dust westward over the North Atlantic are calmer and largely dust free, says Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

    As a result, solar radiation that normally would be scattered back into space by the dust reaches the ocean surface, warming the dark waters (SN: 9/25/01).

    If and when the trade winds strengthen, increased dust from Africa could help cool the area somewhat.

    In a typical year, vast plumes of dust from the Sahara Desert (left in this satellite image of northwest Africa from 2020) block sunlight, shading and cooling the underlying ocean. This spring, a lack of dusty air has contributed to warming of the North Atlantic.NOAA

    Decreased air pollution

    In 2020, new emissions rules kicked in for long-haul container ships that spew sulfate-rich exhaust plumes. There’s been some speculation that less pollution could lead to more heating. With fewer plumes scattering sunlight back into space, more radiation reaches the sea surface.

    But some studies suggest that the cooling effect of ship plumes may have been minor to begin with: Not only do the exhaust plumes have a short life span, the pollutants can cause natural clouds to evaporate more quickly and thus lead to warming, not cooling (SN: 2/1/21).

    Global warming trends

    This year marks the return of El Niño, a climate phenomenon whose hallmark is warmer-than-normal sea-surface temperatures along the equator west of South America. By winter, there’s a more than 4 in 5 chance that the El Niño will be either strong or moderate, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

    Each El Niño has its own personality (SN: 5/2/16). But in general, El Niño boosts average surface temperatures both on land and at sea worldwide, Mann says. Human-caused climate change has done the same, he notes.

    But there’s still a lot of uncertainty about how current conditions may affect the coming forecast.

    The unusually warm waters of the North Atlantic may tend to strengthen storm systems that later develop into tropical depressions and then hurricanes. But the El Niño that’s now developing in the equatorial Pacific may hamper their formation by strengthening winds in the upper atmosphere that can shear the tops off nascent hurricanes. How active this year’s hurricane season will be depends on which of these forces will prevail, scientists say (SN: 5/26/23).  More

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    Wildfire smoke is blanketing the U.S. East Coast. It won’t be the last time

    Even as the thick clouds of smoke from wildfires raging in eastern Canada, which blanketed the U.S. East Coast in a dangerous orange haze, begin to dissipate, researchers are warning it’s a sign of the times.

    Canada’s fire outlook will remain higher than normal for June. And on a larger scale, climate change is projected to make fire conditions more common across Canada, Russia and Alaska’s boreal forests.

    The current fires were sparked by lightning in the Canadian province of Quebec; like much of Canada, parts of Quebec were abnormally dry this spring.

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    Their smoky haze has dominated headlines, prompting warnings of dangerous air pollution levels. People were urged to stay indoors as much as possible, or wear masks, to avoid inhaling the fine particulate matter. The smoke, a toxic brew of irritant gases and tiny particles, can cause asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular problems, and can exacerbate existing conditions such as diabetes and chronic lung conditions (SN: 6/17/22; SN: 9/18/20).

    Wildfire-driven air pollution is all too familiar to residents of the Pacific Northwest and the U.S. West, where most of the continent’s large wildfires occur, but it’s less common in the eastern part of North America. So June’s headline-grabbing haze might be a wake-up call to East Coast policy makers about the hazards of climate change, some researchers hope.

    Smoke from wildfires in Eastern Canada shrouded New York City (shown) and other cities along the U.S. East Coast in a thick haze of fine particles on June 7, leading to a Code Purple day indicating the air was very unhealthy.ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

    There’s plenty of historical precedent for that, says Nicholas Bond, state climatologist for the state of Washington, who is based in Seattle. “There were some periods when dust [from the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s] made it all the way to Washington, D.C., bringing attention to the disaster that was occurring in the Plains states,” he says.

    Whether eastern Canada’s forests in particular will become more fire-prone due to climate change isn’t clear from recent simulations of future climate and fire behavior. The current fires are not necessarily a harbinger of things to come so much as a reminder of what’s already here: They’re burning in regions that are already considered at risk of fire.

    Climate change is projected to boost fires across other vast swaths of boreal forest in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s already having an impact. “Wildfires in the boreal forests of Alaska burned more acres in the past 20 years” than in the previous 20 years, Bond says. How much of the forest is on fire can vary significantly from year to year; 2020 was below-average, with about 73,000 hectares burned. But the overall trend of burned area in boreal forests is expected to curve steeply upward by the middle of the century: The acreage of burned area in Alaska is projected to increase by 24 to 169 percent from 2020 to 2050.

    Fire seasons in boreal forests are also expected to last longer and produce larger fires each year. Climate change may also increase the frequency of lightning strikes that spark fires such as those currently burning in Quebec — although that, too, is still uncertain.

    Canada is currently fighting severe fires across the country, from coast to coast, stretching its resources thin — and the threat is expected to remain high in the coming weeks, the Canadian government reported on June 5.

    That’s also true for the United States. “The Pacific Northwest is liable to be dealing with considerable smoke later this summer,” Bond says, based on a fire potential outlook report released June 1 by the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center. “For personal, selfish reasons I hope the winds do not bring the smoke our way.” More

  • in

    Rising groundwater threatens to spread toxic pollution on U.S. coastlines

    Hidden flows of water are poised to flush toxic contamination into U.S. coastal communities.

    Sea level rise from climate change won’t just force shorelines to retreat — in inland areas, it will guilefully lift groundwater into shallower soils. That rising water could infiltrate hundreds of U.S. Superfund sites — severely polluted locations identified by the Environmental Protection Agency for cleanup — researchers warn in a preliminary study posted May 25 to ESS Open Archive.

    These sites — and thousands of other polluted areas — could be at risk of releasing heavy metals, radioactive elements, pesticides and industrial chemicals associated with human health problems (SN: 4/26/23). People of color and low-income communities would be disproportionately affected.

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    “Just the sheer number of Superfund sites where there are these dangerous contaminants that could be liberated — it’s astonishing,” says coastal geologist Patrick Barnard of the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Cruz, Calif., who wasn’t involved in the study. Many of the polluted areas have been managed without regard for groundwater rise, he says. “We need to think about what the future holds for these sites.”

    The link between climate change, the sea and underground water may not be obvious, but it is intimate. At the beach, seawater can seep into the ground and move inland, permeating layers of earth under coastal communities. Meanwhile, rain and runoff can also trickle down from above. In the ground, this freshwater often sits atop the denser saltwater from the sea. And when the sea level rises due to climate change, it pushes all this groundwater up through the earth (SN: 10/29/19).

    As the top of the groundwater — the water table — nears the surface, it can damage human infrastructure. It can also spread hazardous substances in the soil, exposing people and ecosystems nearby.

    Environmental planner and geologist Kristina Hill found motivation for the new study while investigating groundwater conditions at a former Superfund site in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, groundwater was touching pollutants in the soil. “I started wondering, what is the scale of this problem?” says Hill, of the University of California, Berkeley.

    She and her colleagues identified which of the roughly 1,300 U.S. Superfund sites are in low-lying coastal areas — no more than 10 meters above mean sea level — where groundwater rise could potentially infiltrate.

    They found if the sea surface rose by one meter — a possibility by 2100 — then groundwater could potentially rise into contaminated soils at 326 sites. New Jersey and Florida respectively contained the most at-risk Superfund sites — 54 and 51 respectively.

    Not every polluted site in the United States is a Superfund site, but that doesn’t make them less hazardous, Hill says. Her team assessed that potential impact with a case study of the Bay Area alone. They flagged five Superfund sites and nearly 5,300 state-managed contaminated areas vulnerable to that one-meter sea level rise. There could be thousands more such sites up and down our coastlines, Hill says.

    The researchers analyzed U.S. Census data to investigate who could face the greatest risk of exposure. People from socially vulnerable communities — those whose circumstances limit their ability to prevent suffering or loss in face of a disaster — bore disproportionate risk, they found.

    “The findings are not surprising,” says hydrogeologist Holly Michael of the University of Delaware in Newark. This study takes the first step in addressing the hazard, by calling out where it could arise, she says. More local research will be needed to thoroughly assess each site’s risk and determine next steps, be that treating contaminated soils or removing them altogether.

    As the ocean encroaches, Hill says, helping people move inland won’t be enough unless we also clean up our mess. “Otherwise, there will be a toxic area that we leave behind, and that will spread.” More

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    Surviving a drought may help forests weather future dry spells

    Some forests take one-two punches surprisingly well.

    Researchers have shown that certain California forests exposed to two successive droughts weathered the second one much better than forests only hit by the later dry period. Given that the frequency and severity of droughts is increasing with climate change (SN: 3/10/22), the findings suggest that forested regions might fare better than predicted in the future, the research team proposes in the May 17 AGU Advances. That’s important because of the many resources that forests provide, including their ability to sequester about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans put into the atmosphere every year.

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    Carl Norlen and Mike Goulden, ecologists at the University of California, Irvine, studied roughly 520,000 hectares of California forest (about 4 percent of the state’s forested areas). The researchers focused on conifers, trees such as pines and firs that have needles rather than flat leaves. Using archival data gleaned from airplane observations, Norlen and Goulden estimated the extent of conifer die-off during two droughts that struck from 1999–2002 and 2012–2015. “Both of them when they happened were considered some of the most severe droughts ever in California,” Norlen says.

    When the researchers looked at forests that just experienced the 2012–2015 drought, they found that over 50 percent of forested areas showed evidence of die-off. But when Norlen and Goulden analyzed forests that had weathered both droughts, they were surprised to find that only 13 percent of those forested areas showed evidence of die-off after the second drought. The researchers also analyzed satellite data that revealed the severity of tree die-off, and they again found that forests hurt by one drought were better prepared to weather another.

    The underlying cause of those differences probably has to do with the tree mortality that occurred during the first drought, Norlen and Goulden propose. Roughly 31 percent of the forested areas that experienced both droughts showed signs of die-off during the 1999–2002 drought. “We think that it has to do with experiencing die-off the first time,” Norlen says.

    That makes sense, says William Anderegg, an ecologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who was not involved in the research. “You might have culled out the weak trees,” he says.

    Norlen and Goulden speculate that the first drought eliminated trees weakened by pests like bark beetles (SN: 2/21/23), or perhaps that the dry conditions prompted trees to protect themselves by growing deeper roots. Those changes would have helped protect the remaining trees from future droughts, Goulden says. “You effectively have a stronger population.”

    Getting at the root of why exactly some forests are better prepared to weather successive droughts will require more investigation, the researchers say. One way forward is to monitor individual trees to better understand their physiology, which other teams have done by outfitting trees with sensors (SN: 4/25/23).

    However, the new findings already provide some hope for the forests of the future. Modeling work has suggested that upwards of 50 percent of present-day conifer tree coverage could be lost in the Northern Hemisphere by the end of the century. But this new work shows that that prediction might well turn out to be an overestimate. “There’s an element of it that’s actually hopeful,” Goulden says. More