Page 28 - ARUBA TODAY

A28 SCIENCE
Thursday 12 July 2018
Pollution controls help red spruce rebound from acid rain

By LISA RATHKE northeastern U.S. came
Associated Press about five years ago, sci-
STOWE, Vt. (AP) — The gray entists said, and they de-
trunks of red spruce trees cided to take a closer look.
killed by acid rain once The researchers examined
heavily scarred the moun- 658 red spruce trees in
tain forests of the North- 52 plots in Vermont, New
east. Now those forests Hampshire, New York, Mas-
are mostly green, with the sachusetts and Maine.
crowns of red spruce peek- They found that 75 percent
ing out of the canopy and of the trees and 90 per-
saplings thriving below. cent of the plots showed
A main reason, scientists increasing growth since
say, is a government-en- 2001. They credit cleaner
forced reduction in the kind air and a warming climate
of air pollution that triggers that extended the growing
acid rain. season.
"We've seen it go full arc "Higher temperatures help
from declining for some some species and hurt
unknown reason, to figur- others — right now, red
ing out the reason, to them spruce are benefiting, but
doing something about the they could be vulnerable
cause and then the tree re- to change in the future,"
sponding and rebounding Schaberg said.
again," said Paul Schaberg, Similar trends are emerging
a plant physiologist with In this June 12, 2018, photo, a healthy red spruce tree, center, grows on Mount Mansfield in in the Appalachian Moun-
the U.S. Forest Service and Stowe, Vt. tains in West Virginia, which
a co-author of a new study Associated Press were also hit by acid rain,
on red spruce who has — devastated Northeast age is turning around at the and the variety of species according to a recent re-
been researching the spe- forests and lakes, leaching pace of the red spruce. is not as diverse as before, port in the Global Change
cies since the 1980s. "It's just nutrients from soil and killing Waterways are now show- said Gregory Lawrence, a Biology journal.
an amazing science arc." aquatic life. ing signs of recovery, as research scientist with the The two studies provide
In the 1960s through the Red spruce are particularly are the upper layers of U.S. Geological Survey who further evidence that ad-
1980s, pollution — mostly sensitive to acid rain and, soil, although they are still is based in Troy, New York. dressing causes of acid rain
from coal-powered plants at the height of the die-off, strained by the acid de- In the 1980s, University of helped the species recov-
in the Midwest and car some forests lost 50 percent posits. Researchers are Vermont scientist Hubert er, said Timothy Fahey, a
emissions carried by the of them. finding fish in lakes deemed Vogelmann brought na- forest ecologist and profes-
wind and deposited as But decades later, not all fishless for years, but the tional attention to the acid sor at Cornell University.
acidic rain, snow and fog the environmental dam- populations are not large rain issue by linking air pol- That recovery should help
lution to forest damage efforts to restore red spruce
Chinese find suggests human relatives left on the slopes of Vermont's forests to mountains in cen-

Africa earlier Green Mountains. Airborne tral Appalachia, where
chemicals reacted with they were heavily logged
water and oxygen and in the late 1800s and early
By EMILIANO R. MEGA by at least 250,000 years. the tools were made by then, carried by the wind, 1900s, reducing the habitat
Associated Press "It's absolutely a new sto- another member of the were deposited as acidic for the now-endangered
NEW YORK (AP) — Stone ry," said archaeologist Mi- Homo evolutionary group. rain, snow and fog. Carolina northern flying
tools recovered from an chael Petraglia of the Max The items included several The images of dead trees squirrel.
excavation in China sug- Planck Institute for the Sci- chipped rocks, fragments littering mountains in Last month in Vermont,
gest that our evolutionary ence of Human History and hammer stones. The the 1980s helped inspire Schaberg was hiking
forerunners trekked out in Jena, Germany, who 96 artifacts were dug up changes to the Clean Air through the woods on
of Africa earlier than we did not participate in the in an area known as the Act in 1990. The amend- Mount Mansfield, Vermont's
thought. Until now, the old- study. "It means that early Loess Plateau, north of the ments proposed by Presi- highest peak, with Alexan-
est evidence of human- humans were getting out Qinling mountains, which dent George H.W. Bush in dra Kosiba, lead researcher
like creatures outside Af- of Africa way earlier than divide the north and south 1989 mandated reductions for their study in the journal
rica came from 1.8 million- we ever realized." That of China. Some of them in certain gas emissions Science of the Total Envi-
year-old artifacts and skulls exit came long before were as old as 2.1 million and boosted regulation of ronment. They found red
found in the Georgian our own species, Homo years, according to the toxic pollutants. spruce at middle eleva-
town of Dmanisi. But the sapiens, even appeared. study in Wednesday's jour- The first signs of healthier tions and higher that were
new find pushes that back The researchers believe nal Nature.q red spruce trees in the thriving. The trees were sur-
rounded by saplings, and
seed-bearing cones lay on
the ground.
"This is a good sign that the
species is doing well in the
near term, and then the
future forests will have red
spruce," said Kosiba, a staff
scientist for the Forest Eco-
system Monitoring Coop-
erative at the University of
Vermont.q