Leading up to Earth Day on Friday, last week’s CBS Mornings show featured several reports on environmental issues. One that caught my eye provided a birds-eye view of 10 giant octagonal glass chambers in northern Minnesota’s Marcell Experimental Forest operated by the U.S. Forest Service. They look very much like an alien colony!
It turns out, though, that this out-of-this-world complex is the home of the “SPRUCE” experiment, providing data on Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments. From what I saw on CBS, things do not look good for boreal trees subjected to the most extreme conditions of temperature and carbon dioxide. However, it will be best not to make any conclusions until this “largest climate change experiment on the planet” ends it’s 10-year run some years from now.
“Will deep belowground warming in future release 10,000 years of accumulated carbon from peatlands that store one-third of earth’s terrestrial carbon?”
– The ‘bombshell’ question that the SPRUCE experiment hopes to answer