Month: June 2022

Break in the weather
I lean on a tree, the tree
In gusts leans on me

-Calvin Olsen

From National Geographic:

Not many animals or humans eat these neither-oranges-nor-apples. Though a couple animals, mainly squirrels, sometimes eat the seeds hidden inside the green flesh, they do not disperse them far. Some researchers think that the tree was once spread by extinct megafauna, perhaps giant ground sloths or mastodons, and that these fruits evolved to their ponderous size to appeal to these vanished giants.

From the BBC:

It’s around this time that the London plane tree came into being. To this day, its origins remain a mystery. But somehow, amid the chaotic meeting of the so-called New World and the Old, two plants from continents thousands of miles apart – an American sycamore and an Oriental plane – met and reproduced.

From NASA Earth Observatory:

Every now and then, a new map changes the way we view our planet. This is one of those maps.

From the Washington Post:

Cattle ranching, responsible for the great majority of deforestation in the Amazon, is pushing the forest to the edge of what scientists warn could be a vast and irreversible dieback that claims much of the biome. Despite agreement that change is necessaryto avert disaster, despite attempts at reform, despite the resources of Brazil’s federal government and powerful beef companies, the destruction continues.

From Bjørn Karmann:

Occlusion Grotesque is an experimental typeface that is carved into the bark of a tree. As the tree grows, it deforms the letters and outputs new design variations, that are captured annually. The project explores what it means to design with nature and on nature’s terms.

From Nature:

Scientists have struggled for decades to uncover humanity’s historical footprint in the forest and determine what kind of an impact people had centuries to millennia ago. Their goal is to understand the evolution of the rainforest and just how much of the landscape we see today is ‘natural’ versus how much has been shaped by human hands.

Studies dating back to the 1950s suggested that small indigenous tribes merely scratched out a living in primitive villages before the arrival of Europeans. But more recently, researchers have proposed that the Amazon hosted complex societies that turned swathes of the forest into farms and orchards. Some estimates place the prehistoric population of the Amazon as high as 10 million — a huge number considering that the current population is around 30 million.

From Bitter Southerner:

It was October 2020, and I had taken a position caretaking Hopkins Mountain Fireman’s Cabin, a historic fire tower observer’s cabin in the Monongahela National Forest. The Monongahela comprises almost 1 million acres of protected forest blanketing the mountain ranges on the eastern edge of West Virginia. The cabin itself was not much to admire — just a 14-by-13-foot gable-roofed room with a small concrete front porch. But the view from the porch — an eastern-facing vista of layered mountain ranges, nesting together far into Virginia — was breathtaking.

From Big Game Conservation Association:

Cedar spread happens slowly and often goes without notice. But over the last 30 years, cedar forest has increased 600% in Nebraska. When scattered cedar trees transition to a forest, they reduce grassland dependent wildlife, reduce forage production, reduce stream flow and increase wildfire risk. It is estimated that given the current rate of spread, it will cost Nebraskans 15 million annually just to prevent more grasslands from becoming a cedar forest. Many senators heard our message, and there is hope for continued dialogue among policy makers.

From NASA Earth Observatory:

Dark green mangrove forests surround Ria Celestún and are interwoven between smaller estuaries reaching toward the Gulf of Mexico. The ebb and flow of ocean currents suspends and resuspends sediments here, giving the shallow, brackish estuaries hues of orange and reddish-brown.

Inland, the dissolution and collapse of limestone bedrock help form sinkholes called cenotes. These geologic features are a type of karst topography that forms when carbonic acid in groundwater dissolves calcium carbonate in the rocks. These porous limestone sinkholes filter salt out of seawater, creating reservoirs that have been used as freshwater resources since the Mayan Civilization.