AMAZONAS, Brazil: Two researchers wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants to resist mosquitos, and high boots to block snake bites, gaze at a shattered tree. It lies on the ground garlanded in palm fronds, stretching far into the forest. Until recently, it had towered over most other trees in this vast rainforest. “It’s lightning, obviously,” says Evan Gora, declaring the tree’s cause of death. He’s a staff scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. “You can see burned leaves on the top,” agrees Adriane Esquivel Muelbert. She’s a professor at the University of Birmingham in England. Adriane points up at blackened foliage dangling from 20 trees circling the perimeter of the huge stump. The leaves are seared only on the sides facing the canopy gap left when the big tree toppled — evidence of an electrical strike. Like Sherlock Holmes unraveling a murder mystery, the tropical forest ecology experts present their reasoning to two postdocs on their team. When lightning hits a tree, Evan says, high voltage flows through intertwined foliage into neighboring trees, killing branches, creating a distinctive pattern. Evan developed this method for determining lightning as a cause of tree death while working in a Panamanian rainforest. Today, he’s identified the same radiating pattern of scorched dead vegetation here around this fallen giant in the Brazilian Amazon. No other cause of tree death looks like this. “You sometimes can have many trees standing dead together, but not with this centralized [burn] damage,” Adriane comments.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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