<
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/ghost-forests-are-growing-as-sea-levels-rise/>
"Like giant bones planted in the earth, clusters of tree trunks, stripped clean
of bark, are appearing along the Chesapeake Bay on the United States’
mid-Atlantic coast. They are ghost forests: the haunting remains of what were
once stands of cedar and pine. Since the late 19th century, an ever-widening
swath of these trees have died along the shore. And they won’t be growing back.
These arboreal graveyards are showing up in places where the land slopes gently
into the ocean and where salty water increasingly encroaches. Along the United
States’ East Coast, in pockets of the West Coast, and elsewhere, saltier soils
have killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind woody
skeletons typically surrounded by marsh.
What happens next? That depends. As these dead forests transition, some will
become marshes that maintain vital ecosystem services, such as buffering
against storms and storing carbon. Others may become home to invasive plants or
support no plant life at all—and the ecosystem services will be lost.
Researchers are working to understand how this growing shift toward marshes and
ghost forests will, on balance, affect coastal ecosystems.
Many of the ghost forests are a consequence of sea level rise, says coastal
ecologist Keryn Gedan of George Washington University in Washington, DC,
coauthor of an article on the salinization of coastal ecosystems in the
2025
Annual Review of Marine Science. Rising sea levels can bring more intense
storm surges that flood saltwater over the top of soil. Drought and sea level
rise can shift the groundwater table along the coast, allowing saltwater to
journey farther inland, beneath the forest floor. Trees, deprived of fresh
water, are stressed as salt accumulates.
Yet the transition from living forest to marsh isn’t necessarily a tragedy,
Gedan says. Marshes are important features of coastal ecosystems, too. And the
shift from forest to marsh has happened throughout periods of sea level rise in
the past, says Marcelo Ardón, an ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist at North
Carolina State University in Raleigh.
“You would think of these forests and marshes kind of dancing together up and
down the coast,” he says."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
