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Less Sea Ice Means More Arctic Trees—Which Means Trouble

White spruce are spreading in the high north, thanks to extra snow. That “Arctic greening” has serious climate implications.

The loss of sea ice offshore there is triggering an atmospheric process that generates more snow onshore, helping spruce seedlings living at the tree line take hold at higher elevations and in farther-north latitudes than previously found. Not only are the white spruce seedlings getting a nice, warming blanket of snow, they’re essentially getting bottle-fed the nutrients they need to grow and produce the cones and seeds that disperse beyond the current tree line. “It's a really nice analysis that gets well beyond the simple relationships that people have postulated for a long time about air temperature being the big driver of tree line advance,” says Scott Goetz, science lead of NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, who wasn’t involved in the research.

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