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For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina’s coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call “ghost forests.” Killed by intruding saltwater along the Atlantic Coast, they are previews of the dire fate other forests face worldwide.
Ury knew that ghost forests were expanding in the region, but only when she began looking down from above using Google Earth did she realize how extensive they were.
“I found so many dead forests,” says Ury, an ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a paper on the rapid deforestation of the North Carolina coast published in 2021 in the journal Ecological Applications. “They were everywhere.”
As the ocean intrudes and saltwater rises, it kills trees and creates these ghost forests—bare trunks, and stumps, ashen tombstones marking a once-thriving coastal ecosystem. In North Carolina, pine, red maple, sweet gum, and bald cypress forests are being replaced by salt marsh. Eventually, that salt marsh will be replaced by open water, a shift that leads to significant and complex costs to the environment and the local economy. The loss of forests will reduce carbon storage, further fueling climate change, and the agriculture industry and timber interests will suffer as saltwater moves inland.
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A ghost forest in Montana. (Getty Images)
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