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The scent of Black Spruce filled the crisp autumn air as

Scott Goetz made his way to the array of light
detectors spread beneath the canopy of the Alaskan
forest. The sun sat low on the horizon, casting long
shadows on the forest floor. The long night of winter
was quickly approaching, and the detectors would no
longer be needed for the year. Though he was there to
study the forest, how it absorbed light and carbon and
turned them into materials like leaves and bark, it was
the wilderness of the place that initially attracted Goetz.
He had grown attached to these Northern forests as a
graduate student canoeing through the interlinked
lakes of Minnesotas Boundary Waters Wilderness
Area while collecting data for a NASA research project.
Now an established ecologist, Goetz had spent at least
a decade studying and exploring the boreal forests of
North America. He knew the forest well.


At the close of the growing season of 2004, Goetz was
seeing changes in the forest. The blackened skeletons
of trees extended into the distance after fires
consumed a record six million acres. Up close, the gold
and green leaves of the rustling aspen trees were
marbled with white squiggly lines where leaf miners
had eaten through them. While both fires and insects
were a natural part of the forests lifecycle, Goetz
hadnt seen either have such a wide impact on the
forest before. But the most disturbing and unexpected
change, he had observed months earlier back in his
office at the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods
Hole, Massachusetts.
Spruce trees surround light
detectors on the floor of the
boreal forest in Alaska.
Scientists are traveling to sites
in the remote North to study the
effects of climate change on
ecosystems around the world.
Scott Goetz uses light detectors
to measure the sunlight
absorbed by the trees. The
scientists combine these
measurements with satellite
data to gauge the health of the
forest. (Photo copyright Daniel
Steinberg, Woods Hole
Research Center.)
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In addition to his research in the forest, Goetz was
using satellite data to study how the spruce-rich forests
of northern Canada and Alaska recover after large
fires. The burned forest was re-growing as he
expected, but the unburned forest was behaving
strangely. Since the 1990s, scientists have known that
increasing global temperatures have lengthened the
growing season in the Arctic. With carbon dioxide, one
of the key ingredients in photosynthesis, also on the
rise, the forest should have been thriving. But it wasnt.
The forest was getting browner, not greener.
On the other side of the United States, Alon Angert, a
scientist at the University of California, Berkeley,
noticed a strange trend in the forest, too. Angert was
tracking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the
Arctic from 1985 to 1994 when he saw that trees
werent soaking up as much of the gas at the end of
the period as at the beginning. It was as if the whole
forest had slowed its breathing during that single
decade.
Something big is happening in the high latitudes, says
Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA Ames
Research Center, in response to the papers that Goetz
and Angert published within weeks of each other.
Nemani was on the research team that initially noticed
that the Arctic was beginning to green in response to
global warming in the 1990s. Despite the previous
discovery, Nemani wasnt surprised that Northern
forests now seem to have slowed their growth. After all,
the same theories that predicted that global warming
would increase forest growth in the Arctic, theories that
Nemani helped prove, also predicted that the forests
would eventually reach the limits of the water supply
and go into decline. We knew something like this
would happen, Nemani says. We didnt expect that it
was going to happen so quickly.
In early autumn, the brilliant
golden leaves of an Aspen
forest mix with the deeps green
of the dominant coniferous
forest. Insect infestations and
other signs of ill-health are
starting to appear in the forest,
signs of the changing climate.
(Photo courtesy Tom
VandenBerg and the National
Park Service.)
The boreal forests (also called
taiga) encircle the Arctic,
occupying the northern
expanses of Asia, Europe, and
North America. In this map, the
boreal forests are dark green
areas, tundra and barren land
are tan, while crops and
grasslands are yellow. In total,
the boreal forest covers 16.6
million square kilometers (6.41
million square miles.) (Map by
Robert Simmon, based on data
provided by BU Land Cover
and Land Cover Dynamics.)
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What is happening to the forests of northern Alaska,
Canada, Europe, and Siberia? Why have they slowed
their growth when everyone thought they should be
expanding for several more decades? Is the trend that
Goetz and Angert independently observed a fluke, a
temporary downturn in the health of the forests, or is it
something more? Is it a sign that global warming is
changing Northern forests more quickly than anyone
thought possible?
The answers to these questions impact more than the
sparsely populated forests of the North. In most
predictions of global warming, the forests of the far
North will expand into the treeless tundra and grow
more quickly as warmer temperatures improve growing
conditions. A fast-growing forest would soak up more
carbon dioxide, dampening the effects of warming. But
if the forests arent growing as predicted, carbon
dioxide could build in the atmosphere, driving global
temperatures up even more. Warming temperatures
could bake soil and plants, causing them to release
more carbon dioxide than they absorb. The switch from
carbon sink to source is a possibility that scientists
anticipated for the next century, but are Goetz and
Angerts observations a sign that the forests are
already approaching this threshold?
Satellites Reveal a Browning Forest