Climate change threatens mighty bristlecone
 | | PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEITH LADZINSKI | | Some of these trees have been standing long before the time of Muhammad, many centuries before Jesus and Cleopatra, even before Egypt’s pyramids. In high altitudes, their pale trunks, twisted by centuries of gusting wind and rain, have grown slowly in terrain that frustrates other plants. Evidence shows one of them has endured nearly 5,000 years.
But will climate change fell the mighty Great Basin bristlecone pine of North America and its possible longevity challenger, South America’s Patagonian cypress?
Experts tell Nat Geo’s Craig Welch that bristlecones at lower elevations may be vulnerable, but change would have to occur more rapidly than projected to kill the bristlecones higher up mountains, where the trees are most at home.
Read the full story here.
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| Isn’t it iconic? The 1,400-year-old bristlecone pine on Nevada's Mount Washington (pictured at top) is so iconic its image is stamped on the back of some U.S. quarters. The young bristlecone pine (above left) survived a 2000 fire that killed thousands of others. The bristlecone‘s slow-growing, sculpted wood (above right) is difficult for pathogens and insects to penetrate. Their growth rings show climate variability over thousands of years.
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| ‘The most extensive art installations on Earth’: That’s how Nat Geo photographer and Explorer John Stanmeyer refers to the ubiquitous pipes of Armenia, which we recently featured on our Instagram page. Stanmeyer covered Armenia for a haunting 2016 magazine article on the century-old massacres in the ancient land. The pipelines, which Stanmeyer calls a kind of Loch Ness on land, “satisfied a need for a distraction, to unravel the mystery of simple beauty.”
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 | ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW FAZEKAS
| | The stars of Gemini: Tomorrow evening, the crescent moon poses with the stars Pollux and Castor in the southwestern skies. The brightest members of the constellation Gemini offer a contrast in color, with Castor shining brilliant white, while Pollux glows golden yellow. See how soon after sunset you can see these two stars beside the moon. On Friday the moon will glide higher in the southern sky, guiding an observer to the Beehive star cluster. By Sunday night the thicker moon will be parked within Leo. The constellation’s Regulus star is 340 times more luminous and is three times larger than our sun. Think you know your constellations? Take our quiz. — Andrew Fazekas
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 | | ILLUSTRATION BY ENZO PÉRÈS-LABOURDETTE | | Must we save ticks and mites, too? Parasites might seem gross, and your first thought if a few of then go extinct might be “Good riddance!” But Erika Engelhaupt explains that these “slimy and flaccid and wiggling” things can be just as important as the cute, charismatic animals they live off of—and many parasites may be on the verge of disappearing.
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Lastly, how better to celebrate International Dinosaur Day than to catch one of our favorite stories on the topic, our 2020 look at Reimagining Dinosaurs?
This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, Heather Kim, and Monica Williams. Have an idea for us? Let us know. And thanks for reading. | |
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