ABOVE: As saltwater kills trees in a forest along Phillips Creek in Virginia, marshland slowly creeps into its place.
© TYLER MESSERSCHMIDT
They look like the skeletons of giants reaching for the sky. Tall and ashen, stripped of their leaves and most of their branches, the trees stand in uneven rows that extend as far as the eye can see, grave markers of a forest that once thrived near this North Carolina coastline.
“These ghost forests are the leading edge of climate change,” Emily Bernhardt, an ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist at Duke University, tells The Scientist. They succumbed in slow motion to salty water making its way inland as sea levels rose, and serve as a reminder that global warming isn’t something just affecting polar bears in remote locations, or something that will happen in the distant future, she says. “It is already happening, and happening really fast on the coastal ...
