These trees are distributed northward in Alaska. not good

Arctic Green is a warning light shining on the dashboard of both local and global climate damage. Spreading bushes is one thing – they are small and grow relatively quickly – but long-lived white spruce is another thing entirely. “When you see trees growing, you know the climate has really changed,” Dial said. “It’s not like five-year weather or 10-year weather. It was 30 years of climate that established new trees in new places.

Writing in the magazine this month NatureCall and his colleagues put hard numbers on what they found in the Alaskan tundra: White spruce, both individually and as a population, is growing at a high rate there. In what should be a tree-unfriendly place on the planet, people are moving north at 2.5 miles per decade, faster than any tree line scientists have ever imagined.

Spruce seeds usually do not travel more than a few hundred feet up the tree. But Call is finding young white spruce growing from seeds that travel 5 to 7 miles. On the mountains, no less. The population is not moving north, it is jumping. “These new colonists, you’d think above the tree line, have to fight. But they are actually growing fast,” says Dial. “They’re as happy as pigs – they’re going gangbusters in the arctic tundra and the alpine tundra. They are ahead. They are doing better than the bushes.”

Exactly why they’re doing so well will require more research, but he speculates that call colonists can access nutrients intact in the soil. In contrast, back at the tree line, existing generations of white spruce have taken the best out of the soil, perhaps slowing their progress. “If you want to study how forests move, it may not be appropriate to go to the tree line because the tree line is a closed area,” Dial says. If you want to know ‘how can a business be better?’ You probably won’t learn a struggling business. Look for startups that are doing well.

And, boy, is business booming for white spruce now. Soil microbes in this part of the Arctic are giving them a boost of sorts. Microorganisms multiply when the waste is heated, preparing nutrients for the trees. “It’s clear that warmer conditions and growing seasons are the cause of warming,” said Scott Goetz, a macroscale ecologist at Northern Arizona University who studies arctic greening but was not involved in the new research. “So everything has become more convenient, and I think nutrients are only part of the story.”