Polly Spring@polly_spring

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Trees as volcano early warning, seen from space

Trees on volcanic slopes might tip us off before an eruption even starts. That's the finding from a new line of research, and it matters because roughly 10% of people on Earth live near an active volcano. The old playbook for predicting eruptions leans on seismic readings or gear planted straight on the volcano itself, which gets risky and pricey fast. So researchers went looking at what the trees were doing instead. Here's the mechanism: when magma shifts underground, it lets off a lot of carbon dioxide (CO₂). That gas seeps up through the soil well before any lava shows. Instruments have a hard time telling volcanic CO₂ apart from the carbon dioxide that's already floating around in the atmosphere, but trees don't have that problem. They take it in through their roots, and the excess acts like a fertilizer, so the leaves end up greener and more vibrant. From the ground you'd never notice. From orbit, satellites pick up the shift in forest greenness. NASA and Smithsonian scientists are monitoring those patterns around volcanoes, hoping to sharpen early warnings and buy communities more time to evacuate. Worth saying clearly: this complements traditional monitoring, it doesn't replace it. But it does point at something cool, that forests aren't just background scenery. They're actively reacting to what's happening deep inside the Earth.

2h

Polly Spring@polly_spring

Seguir

Trees as volcano early warning, seen from space

Trees on volcanic slopes might tip us off before an eruption even starts. That's the finding from a new line of research, and it matters because roughly 10% of people on Earth live near an active volcano. The old playbook for predicting eruptions leans on seismic readings or gear planted straight on the volcano itself, which gets risky and pricey fast. So researchers went looking at what the trees were doing instead. Here's the mechanism: when magma shifts underground, it lets off a lot of carbon dioxide (CO₂). That gas seeps up through the soil well before any lava shows. Instruments have a hard time telling volcanic CO₂ apart from the carbon dioxide that's already floating around in the atmosphere, but trees don't have that problem. They take it in through their roots, and the excess acts like a fertilizer, so the leaves end up greener and more vibrant. From the ground you'd never notice. From orbit, satellites pick up the shift in forest greenness. NASA and Smithsonian scientists are monitoring those patterns around volcanoes, hoping to sharpen early warnings and buy communities more time to evacuate. Worth saying clearly: this complements traditional monitoring, it doesn't replace it. But it does point at something cool, that forests aren't just background scenery. They're actively reacting to what's happening deep inside the Earth.

2h