Re: 湾区封城
Posted: 2020-08-24 2:30
还想回去尝尝四月说的朝鲜蓟心面包呢!山火应该没有烧到镇子上,但是离那边太近,不知道什么时候能消停了。
California fires: Burned redwoods at Big Basin, other parks will recover soon, experts say
Studies after other fires in redwood forests found trees turned green in months
By PAUL ROGERS | progers@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: August 24, 2020 at 2:16 p.m. | UPDATED: August 24, 2020 at 9:33 p.m.
The historic fire that roared through the ancient redwoods of Big Basin Redwoods State Park in Santa Cruz County, blackening all 18,000 acres of California’s oldest state park and destroying its historic buildings, has drawn international attention and prompted an outpouring of grief and concern.
But fire scientists who have carefully studied other coastal redwood forests after wildfires have surprisingly good news: Don’t worry. Even though they look terrible now, most of the trees will recover.
Not in 100 years. But much sooner. Amazingly, most of the giant, scorched black trees will begin sprouting green leaves again by this winter, they say, when rains begin. Coast redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth, have the Latin name Sequoia Sempervirens, which means “ever-living Sequoia.” Their breathtaking ability to stand tall in the face of floods, fires and other calamities is how they live to be up to 2,000 years old.
Individual trees at Big Basin today were standing during the Roman Empire. And, the scientists say, they will endure.
A San Jose State University scientist who monitored 667 trees in three areas in the Santa Cruz Mountains after lightning fires in 2008 and 2009 at Bonny Doon, Mount Madonna County Park and Swanton Pacific Ranch found that 88% of the redwoods that burned there lived and were regrowing two years later. By comparison, only 25% of Douglas fir trees survived.
“The redwoods were really resilient. Anything with a diameter bigger than 3 inches basically survived,” said Rachel Lazzeri-Aerts, an instructor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the university.
“Some of those trees looked like little charcoal sticks,” she said. “Within a year they sprouted new growth, new needles. They looked like bright green pipe cleaners. It was really kind of cool.”
Similarly, in the late 1980s, Mark Finney, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, burned 20 plots of redwoods, each about half an acre, in Trione-Annadel State Park in Sonoma County and Humboldt Redwoods State Park in Humboldt County to test their resilience to fire. He burned in spring and fall, and from low to very high intensities, with inmate fire crews standing by.
“We tried our best to kill them and we couldn’t,” he said.
Unlike many other trees, redwoods have cells that lie dormant in their trunks and limbs for centuries, he explained. When the trees burn, the cells sprout new buds. Moreover, their bark is up to a foot thick, and fire-resistant. As long as every part of the cambium, or softer inner layer under the bark, isn’t destroyed, the trees almost always recover from fire, he said. Even if they topple, new redwoods sprout from the same roots.
“These trees are amazing,” Finney said. “Redwoods are an ancient lineage. There are fossils of them from tens of millions of years ago. It’s not the same kind of creature as our other trees. They have lived through a lot.”
Finney, now a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Science Lab in Montana, looked through photos taken at Big Basin last week by a Bay Area News Group photographer.
“None of this looks that bad to me,” he said. “There’s a lot of scorch in there, but most of these trees are fine. You can see brown foliage on these trees. It doesn’t mean the tree is dead at all. It means the foliage is dead, but the buds underneath the branches and main stem are still alive, and they will probably sprout right back. Most of these trees will do just fine. I know it sounds shocking. If this was a forest in the Sierra Nevada, most of them would be dead.”
Redwood trees burned in the 1991 Oakland Hills fire, he said. Some looked like black telephone poles afterward, but most grew back. A few will be so badly burned in Big Basin at the base that they may topple. But most won’t, he added.
Another researcher who studied four areas in Mendocino County, Big Sur and Santa Cruz after the 2008 lightning fires found the same thing.
“One year later, even large trees where all the foliage was scorched off were covered with a light green fuzz of new foliage,” Ben Ramage, a former ecologist at UC Berkeley, said at the time. “Of trees over 1.5 feet in diameter, maybe only one redwood out of a hundred was killed.”
Climate change will make future fires burn hotter, said Reed Noss, a renowned conservation biologist who wrote “The Redwood Forest: History, Ecology, and Conservation of the Coast Redwoods.”
“These trees are very resilient,” he said. “They can bounce back. But the resilience is being pushed to the limit with this new climate.”
The fire burning now in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties, called the CZU Lightning Complex Fire, started Aug. 16 during a lightning storm. By Monday night, it had burned 78,684 acres, destroyed 276 structures and killed one person. It was 13% contained.
It has mostly burned redwood forest land. In addition to Big Basin, the fire has made its way through undeveloped parts of Henry Cowell Redwoods, Butano, Portola Redwoods, upper Wilder Ranch and Cascade Ranch at Año Nuevo state parks, in areas with lots of dead brush due to generations of fire suppression. The last time a major fire burned in the Santa Cruz Mountains was 1948, when the Pine Mountain Fire blackened 16,000 acres between Boulder Creek and Bonny Doon.
In 1904, a large fire at Big Basin prompted the New York Times to report that the park “seems doomed to destruction, though hundreds of men are fighting the fires.” But only the eastern third of the park burned. Generations of visitors since have marveled at the 250-foot trees bearing black scars from that fire.
“People are saying on my Facebook and Instagram pages ‘Oh my God, the park is gone,’ ” said Lazzeri-Aerts. “I’m telling them the trees will regrow but the historic buildings and everything in them — the historic pictures, the documents, the exhibits on the walls — can’t be replaced. In the short term, the trees are going to look kind of charcoal-y, but it will all come back.”
对于两千年的红木来说一百年也是短时间。自然并不在乎我们看不看得到。恐龙一样灭绝了。唐唐的郁金香 wrote: ↑2020-08-25 13:06我不是专家,刚才搜了一下生态学论文没搜出来。Peter Wohlleben在他的书里多次提到,他应该也是引用的。
我相信红杉林的修复能力,但我关心的是过去几十年来山火的规模越来越大持续时间越来越长,再加上其它的环境破坏,再抗烧的红杉也需要时间来修复。按照人类的time scale,还有时间吗?四月贴的新闻里说:“In the short term, the trees are going to look kind of charcoal-y, but it will all come back.” 树会恢复的,需要十年,五十年,还是一百年?人类还能见到吗?
顺便推荐一下Peter Wohlleben,他的The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World完全改变了我对树和森林的直观印象。在气候问题上,Peter Wohlleben其实算乐观派。 树生活在慢车道上,动物(包括人类)生活在快车道上。人类搞地球,先搞死的就是自己。没关系,树还在,地球会慢慢恢复的 所谓高等生命则不一定。
太好了,我来美国读书去的第一个州立公园就是Big Basin。简直不敢相信一下就烧光了。笑嘻嘻 wrote: ↑2020-08-25 18:18好消息。 Some Good News: Many of Big Basin's Ancient Redwoods Appear to Have Survived
据说要至少一年重建, 弯曲camping本来就紧缺得像个笑话,这下更严重了。simonsun wrote: ↑2020-08-26 3:07太好了,我来美国读书去的第一个州立公园就是Big Basin。简直不敢相信一下就烧光了。笑嘻嘻 wrote: ↑2020-08-25 18:18好消息。 Some Good News: Many of Big Basin's Ancient Redwoods Appear to Have Survived
好惊险!幸好不是蛇,我最怕蛇。
西方文化中把人和自然对立起来,要征服自然,有枪炮,又有一神教当精神武器,当年印第安人肯定觉得白人才是野蛮人,又野蛮又疯狂狠毒。营地有一个红木树桩,是当年白人来的时候砍了做dancing floor. 我惊到了,说太可惜了,这么大的树多么珍稀啊。但是后来看到一个更精涑的,是一颗特别美丽特别古老巨大的红木, 被称为mother of the forest,是当时白人 把7尺厚的树皮剥下来,拿到伦敦重新组装起来展览。于是这棵树就慢慢死了。我立即就不行了。砍树还是体面的一刀, 活剥皮?太可怕了。
预告(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztIQkixuOmc)看上去很可爱,下次和孩子一起看。提起一群孩子露营,不,被困,无人岛,我就想起The Lord of Flies。这部书/电影不是一直当成“human nature”的象征吗,其实最多是English Public School boy culture 。