28 F at 5AM this morning; 29 at dawn.
In the dog watering tub, a layer of ice, some in my hand here.
Down by the dirt pit, ice pushing out of the ground:
And a tiny longleaf in a field of icy clay:
Pictures by John S. Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 7 Dec 2010.
Hey, it was 70 degrees! Chilly! The dogs didn’t know what to think. Buy she’s Abby Normal: Continue reading
Alex J. Chepstow-Lusty talks about a tree from Peru,
“huarango, a tree that lives in highly arid zones and stabilizes the soil with some of the deepest roots of any tree known-and can live up to 1000 years”:
“At the bottom of the profile, I found lots of huarango pollen. This indicates that large forests were originally growing in that area.Hm, around here we’ve only seen a 700-year flood last year. When it happens again in a year or so, what will we call it?Subsequently, I saw cotton pollen and other weeds, but still a lot of huarango pollen. It seems at this stage farming was in balance with the environment,” Chepstow-Lusty said.
Then, about 400 A.D., the Nazca apparently stopped growing cotton, switching to large crops of maize.
The researchers found a major reduction of huarango pollen, indicating that people started clearing the forests to plant more crops.
But the agricultural gain from clearing forests was short-lived. When a mega El Nino event hit the south coast of Peru in about 500 A.D., there were no huarango roots to anchor the landscape.
The fields and canal systems were washed away, leaving a desert environment. Today, only pollen from plants adapted to salty and arid conditions can be found, Chepstow-Lusty said.
“The bottom line is that the Nazca could have survived the devastating El Nino floods had they kept their forests alive. Basically, the huarango trees would have cushioned that major event,” Beresford-Jones said.
Rain pouring through window, Nashville, Tennessee, 2 May 2010.
Meanwhile, upmoat: Continue reading
Enough to make snowballs: Continue reading
Many people think it takes fire to make longleaf produce seeds. These pictured seedlings came from a tree that hasn’t had fire near it for more than ten years. So why so many seedlings this year? Continue reading
Picture by Gretchen Quarterman, 8 Feb 2010, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 6 Jan 2010.
County Chairman declares emergency so county can use local ordinances.
Valdosta flooded; residents canoing around streets.
I wonder if anybody will draw a connection between all the tree cutting and paving of recent years and this flooding, which is at least partly due to increased runoff because of those things.