This Christmas, It’s ‘Firmageddon’ as Climate Change Hits Oregon

This story was first published in The Guardian.

A record number of dead fir trees have been found in Oregon, a sign of how the American West is being ravaged by climate change.

A recent aerial survey found that more than a million acres of forest contain trees that have died due to stress and a long dry spell. The images were released by the US Forest Service.

According to Daniel DePinte, an aerial survey program manager with the Forest Service, this year saw the highest mortality rate for firs in this area in history. The evergreen conifers are less hardy than other trees in the landscape.

Between June and October, he and his colleagues scanned the slopes from planes to show the extent of the damage. He knew that this year would be unlike anything he had seen before. The data, first reported by the environmental journalism nonprofit Columbia Insight, is still being finalized, but dead trees were seen in areas across 1.1 million acres of Oregon forest. Scientists have dubbed itfirmageddon.

The size of this is huge. He said that a lot of people think that climate change is only affecting the ice caps or some low-level island. It doesn't bode well if this continues as climate change keeps on and we ignore what nature is showing us around the globe.

Firs are vulnerable due to the ongoing and recent extreme heat. The climate crisis is expected to change the ecology of the planet. The loss of these trees is a sign that the forest is changing.

DePinte said that it will be a different forest with a different feel. The firs will be eliminated from those areas over time because there isn't enough to support them.

There were expected to be signs of stress in the forests but the sudden increase in mortality was frightening. The largest area where dead trees have been recorded in Oregon was in 1952.

Christine Buhl, a forest entomologist with the Oregon Department of Forestry, said that seeing a peak within a year is concerning. The forest was affected by the underlying conditions that caused the spike, which were record-high temperatures and record low precipitation.

She said that the roots of trees that are stressed by the heat die back and make it harder for them to recover. During growing seasons when precipitation was once more plentiful, a tree's vascular tissues that are used to draw in water are harmed by a lack of moist weather.