Ghost forests are becoming more real

A decaying forest full of gray leafless trees may seem like the setting of a horror movie. But ghost forests have expanded past silver screens and into coastlines across the country.

Haunting the coast

A ghost forest is the “watery remains of a once verdant woodland,” said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It happens when seawater “advances and overtakes the fresh water that deciduous trees rely upon” and “poisons living trees, leaving a haunted ghost forest of dead and dying timber.”

Researchers found that between 1985 and 2021, 58,998 acres of forest in North Carolina were “converted to marsh, ghost forest and shrub,” said a study published in the journal PLOS One. Conversion into ghost forests has “sped up even more than overall forest loss,” growing by 18,683 acres between 2010 and 2021, "2.5 times faster than between 1985 and 2010,” said a release about the study.

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The problem is not just limited to North Carolina. Between 2012 and 2023, scientists tracked more than 260 million dead trees across the U.S. Great Lakes and coastlines, according to a preprint in bioRxiv. Over half of the mortality was “concentrated in just 10% of forests, primarily in high-elevation inland wetlands and low-lying forests prone to inundation.”

Growing issue

Sea level rise due to climate change is the biggest contributor to the growth of ghost forests. Global mean sea levels are “rising at about 4.1 millimeters per year, and saltwater intrusion is expected to affect nearly 77% of the world’s coastlines by 2100,” said New Scientist. The increased saltwater puts more coastal forests at risk.

There are likely to be long-term climate implications. “Tree mortality and decomposition releases carbon into the atmosphere,” Michelle Sims, a geospatial research scientist at the World Resources Institute, said to New Scientist. “If the forest does not recover, then these areas may not regain their capacity to sequester carbon, and it could represent a more long-term carbon stock loss.”