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A Single Fire Killed at Least 10% of the World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says
- okareaman 5y ago> Brigham, the study's lead author, cautioned that the numbers are preliminary and the research paper has yet to be peer reviewed. Beginning next week, teams of scientists will hike to the groves that experienced the most fire damage for the first time since the ashes settled. It's hard to believe those trees died in this fire. Tragic if true.
- matzab 5y agohttps://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-16/sequoia-giant-forest-trees-prepped-knp-complex-fire https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-16/sequoia-... And it's happening again as we speak.
- Helmut10001 5y agoI am no expert or anything, just want to mention that Sequoias need fire to grow. Their seeds usually survive fire and afterwards, new growth is triggered. This does not mean that human-made fires are good. At this point, any additional release of CO2 is pretty bad.
- okareaman 5y agoSeems like all Californians know this fact. That's why it's so shocking that they perished in the fire.
- Helmut10001 5y agoYes, absolutely.. loosing these giants is really sad. Just motivated by the fact that there are people other than Californians on HN.
- canadianfella 5y agoLosing
- thaumasiotes 5y agoAdult trees also often survive fire; you can walk into any number of hollow, burned-out, still living trees.
- rob74 5y agoYes, but they are adapted to relatively frequent but lower intensity fires. As the article says, for the last century there was a policy of fire suppression, so the "undergrowth" (and from the perspective of a Sequoia, pretty much everything else is undergrowth) is much more dense than it usually was. So if a fire gets out of control, it may get more intense than the Sequoias are adapted to.
- wolverine876 5y agoThe article addresses that. This fire killed the trees.
- mlindner 5y agoIt's highly unlikely that they died. Large sequoias are very very good at surviving fires. The fires don't reach a height that can damage them.
- mancy00 5y agoThis is just awful, but it's pretty clear the forests of the Western US are doomed. It just makes me sad, as I remember those forests from my youth, when they were still vibrant and healthy. 50 years is a long time in a human's life, but it's just a moment in the life of a forest.
- cameron_b 5y agoA lot of forest managers are in agreement with the assertion at the end of the article, that if smaller fires are allowed to clear underbrush and are not squashed for squashing's sake, then there will be fewer mega-fires. That a more natural "fire is part of the landscape" approach is the key to preserving a landscape built by fire. It may not settle on what it looks like right now, but the American west has been fire-managed as far back as people have been talking about it, before it was written.
- anderson1993 5y agoWe are, collectively, a planetary disease.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI really dislike comments like these, because it removes personal responsibility while at the same time blaming everyone for the actions of individuals and the consequences of national or corporate policy. And it low-key advocates in favor of reducing or removing the human population entirely. Forest fires happened outside of human intervention.
- talaketu 5y agoIf you accept the idea that the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then a natural description of large-scale and ongoing reduction in ecological diversity could be "disease".
- d4mi3n 5y agoI think the point GP is making is that this categorization is counterproductive to solving the underlying issues, regardless of what consensus is reached on the taxonomy of our place in the wider ecosystem. To make an analogy: It's a lot like calling a student dumb for being unable to answer questions on a test they didn't have a chance to study for. If the goal is to improve grades, demoralizing the student is counterproductive.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoOr, you could notice that we're the only ones that care. "Reduction", "destruction" are terms meaningful to us and us only, because we're also capable of appreciating the ecosystem as its own thing. The rest of life on this planet falls on the spectrum between "must eat, must not get eaten" and "runaway chemical reaction". If the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then we are its brain cells.
- robbiep 5y ago
- 57844743385 5y agoCan’t sequoia seedlings be planted around the world?
- ncmncm 5y agoIn principle, yes. But wild land is being encroached upon worldwide. And other stuff is already trying to live on what is left. When the seas rose from 20kya until 8kya, inundating millions of square miles of prime habitat, people moved uphill. But other people had already been living there for millennnia. Often those were peoples who had been driven out of prime bottom land, and were making do in marginal circumstances. Guess what happened then.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago> Guess what happened then. They made babies together?
- ncmncm 5y agoCurious description of raping and pillaging you have there.
- cratermoon 5y agoIn other words, they made babies together. Just not in the loving and intimate way usually implied by the phrase.
- poulpy123 5y agoIt's possible. I know a place in a remote part of France with one sequoia. I don't know how it arrived there (there is nothing of interest). However is it a good idea to massively plant sequoias outside their native range ?
- Someone 5y agohttps://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/trees/giantsequoia/elsewhere/ https://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/trees/giantsequoia/elsewh... That site even has a database of sequoias, for example https://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/europe-giantsequoia/ https://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/europe-giantsequoia/
- ncmncm 5y agoApropos: http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf Gotta read to the end. Only 2 pages, though.
- cratermoon 5y agoI was just having a conversation with a friend of mine and talking about a similar thing: we just aren't looking for life as broadly as we might. To a certain extent, it's excusable, because how do you search for something you can't even properly recognize if you found it? How do you decide you've detected life if it doesn't fit any definition of life you can be confident of? Looking for earth-like planets and trying to detect signs of life as we know it might eventually bear fruit, but whatever life is there is likely to resemble earth around the time life emerged on land a relatively recent 400 million years ago. The signs of life won't be alien structures, but biochemical signatures. What about the other 4 billion years, when Earth's life existed only in the oceans? On cosmic time scales, that's far more likely, but do we know enough about what Earth looked like to recognize that on exoplanets? Projects that attempt to detect advanced extra-terrestrial life by their electromagnetic emissions, like SETI, seem especially misguided. We've only had the ability to broadcast radio for 100 years or so. That's laughably short on cosmic time scales, and the distances they've propagated are insignificant even on just a galactic scale. Just 75 other systems exist within that tiny distance, and our signals are likely distorted and attenuated to the point of being indistinguishable from background noise for most of them. The book I like to recommend is titled Life Beyond Earth: The Intelligent Earthling’s Guide to Life in the Universe by Gerald and Feinberg and Robert Shapiro and published in 1980. It speculates on what forms life could take and how we might know something is living even if it doesn't fit our conventional ideas of life as we know it.
- wedesoft 5y agoAccording to [1] there were more fires during the medieval warm period. "The scientists found the years from 800 to 1300, known as the Medieval Warm Period, had the most frequent fires in the 3,000 years studied." [1]: https://phys.org/news/2010-03-giant-sequoias-yield-longest-history.html https://phys.org/news/2010-03-giant-sequoias-yield-longest-h...
- Gravityloss 5y agoSo, is that good news?
- dr_dshiv 5y agoIn recent years, there were fewer fires due to fire suppression, which results in catastrophic large fires
- da_chicken 5y agoWell, and then California had drought. And, then people built in the forests, making the human costs much higher.
- ashtonkem 5y agoIt really astounds me how many people (not you, I don’t think) seem hell bent on blaming California’s wildfires on one source. It can be caused by multiple things at once.
- specialist 5y agoYup. And some of those cofactors are terrifying. Like the vapor pressure deficit. Drier air sucking moisture out of the ground. I'm struggling to imagine how we might mitigate that. "Climate relationships with increasing wildfire in the southwestern US from 1984 to 2015" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378112719314744 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03781... My only notion so far is to pre plant species adapted for the anticipated conditions, ahead of the changes. Good grief.
- aaron695 5y agoWorld’s largest tree wrapped in fire-resistant blanket as California blaze creeps close https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/17/worlds-largest-tree-wrapped-in-fire-resistant-blanket-as-california-blaze-creeps-closer https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/17/worlds-large... > Redwood and sequoia forests are among the world's most efficient at removing and storing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In a world that only cares about the cult of Global Warming, not the ever presence of humanity not taking stewardship of the local environment, such as careful burn offs and recognition that 99.99% has nothing to do with carbon we deserve to lose it all.
- lmilcin 5y agoOne problem with the article is they again claim trees take away carbon from atmosphere. This is only true if you look at short term. In long term trees do nothing to CO2 because they only participate in a CYCLE. For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever. For these sequoias the future is either they burn or they fall down and rot. In both cases the carbon is released.
- Retric 5y agoPermanent carbon sequestration operates on geologic timescales so it’s very very slow, but trees are one of the more common ways to permanently sequester carbon. Deep roots in a low oxygen environment can last a long time. That still takes the top layer of soil being covered, but grass for example simply represents less biomass per acre. Another common process is run off from rivers getting buried under a continuous stream of silt, and a significant portion of that biomass comes from trees.
- sva_ 5y agoBut if you have a large living forest, the cycle of each tree will mean that the forest as a whole will store a lot of co2? There's no point in looking at individual trees.
- lmilcin 5y agoNo, it is just part of the cycle. It stores CO2 but only temporarily. I remember some statistics that humanity is emitting more new carbon into atmosphere every decade that entire mass of biosphere. So if you think about it, our biosphere is pretty irrelevant when it comes to removing carbon from atmosphere. Even if we somehow got it to double its entire mass (nobody even dreams of that), this would amount to pausing our emissions for a decade.
- danparsonson 5y ago> So if you think about it, our biosphere is pretty irrelevant when it comes to removing carbon from atmosphere. Didn't understand your point here initially but I think what you mean is - we've significantly outpaced the biosphere's ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's not irrelevant, it's overloaded.
- someonehere 5y agoHas there been any evidence of the cause of all these fires? It seems like I used to hear how fires may have started in the past, now it seems like it’s ignored.
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y agoIn August 2020, there was a large, rare storm in California. It produced a lot of lightening, but very little actual rain. It produced 10,000 lightening strikes, with no rain to suppress the fires that resulted. This storm transpired across the entire North-western region of the state, starting a half dozen 'complex' fires[0]. Complexes are multiple fires that join together to form one large fire. Any single one of these was devastating. Taken together, it's mind blowing. I remember waking at about 4:00 AM on that Sunday (August 19th). Thunder woke me, and there was plenty of lightening. I dozed and each thunderclap woke me again. I kept waiting for the downpour to start, but it didn't. After about an hour of this, I remember thinking that fires must be starting somewhere. It wasn't long before I could smell smoke. [0]https://twitter.com/ai6yrham/status/1296115884600115200 https://twitter.com/ai6yrham/status/1296115884600115200
- talaketu 5y agoThe article mentioned the fire was started by lightening. It didn't state the cause of all these fires, but there is plenty of evidence and theory about how a hotter drier climate leads to an increase in the intensity and frequency of fires.
- cameron_b 5y agothe assertion at the end of the article is that fire suppression doesn't allow small fires to consume the readily available fuel on the forest floor, leading to large stores of tinder and hotter fires, the kind that could kill a Redwood
- bmeski 5y agoDon't the cones need fire to open and disperse the seeds? I thought this is how that biome works, no matter how many pretty houses you build in it, it's still a wooded desert.
- pvaldes 5y ago> Seeds need fire If this what people are afraid of; We, humans, could do the same without losing 1000 years of wood and killing a few bombers in the process. Scorching a pinecone is easily repeatable in a lab, and then you can care for the saplings for two or five years until you can plant it in nature. End of the problem. Most will survive exactly when we want them to be. Keep the rest of your millions and use it for something more useful than rebuild entire cities each four years. There is not need to burn the forest for that or to convert arsonists or criminals into heroes claiming that 'nobody thinks in the saplings!'. Now all that we need is to stop making excuses to start hunting seriously the criminals and put them in jail. Period.
- wolverine876 5y agoThe article addresses it. This fire killed the trees, overcoming their adaptation to fire.
- newbamboo 5y agoI’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now that some evidence is accrued. The conventional wisdom, we just need more controlled burns; fires are good”, is fallacy. It’s convenient to think that way. It appeals to our taste for “the old ways of doing things” but it pretends to situation is unchanged and it ignores all nuance, namely regional variation in the causes and consequences of these fires, and the changing nature of the ecosystem. I hear people say, “we just need controlled burns because that’s the way it always worked” and it’s like hearing people say “we should just go back to the 1950’s way of life, everything was better then.” It’s appeals to simpletons with an agenda. California is filled with such special interests. We can’t get old growth back. What about beatles? Are all trees the same? How long does it take undergrowth to regenerate after a controlled burn? People can’t answer these, they just repeat mindlessly, “fires are a fact.” Just like the globalization zombies. Imagine if humans had never changed things. We’d still have slavery and be living in caves.
- xboxnolifes 5y agoHow has some evidence accrued for that view? The article you are commenting suggests that fire suppression, not controlled burns, over the past century have lead to more mega fires. People keep talking about more controlled burns because we aren't doing controlled burns. We're actively hindering them.
- hikerclimber1 5y agonice hopefully more fires all over the world and hurricanes and typhoons. everything is subjective especially laws.
- anonAndOn 5y agoThese are the biggest trees on earth.[0] They're absolutely stunning up close if you ever have the chance to see the ancient ones before they disappear. This is a recent list of their last natural groves, some of which are now gone.[1] Are we witnessing the last march of the Ents?[2] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_giant_sequoia_groves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_giant_sequoia_groves [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKl3gPGdtpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKl3gPGdtpc