Humans do a pretty good job of destroying trees with our penchant for deforestation, but Mother Nature is giving us are run for our money in the form of lightning strikes.
Lightning is a far deadlier tree murderer than anyone previously thought. It’s responsible for vaporizing around 320 million trees a year, according to new research from Germany’s Technical University of Munich, or the delightfully acronymed TUM.
That number does not include trees destroyed in the forest fires resulting from a lightning strike. The number only applies to trees that were killed by direct strikes. The TUM team merged a global vegetation model with worldwide lightning data and field observations. The resulting numbers are bleak.
Lightning Is Secretly Killing Millions of Trees
Krause and the rest of the TUM team say lightning takes out somewhere between 2.1 and 2.9 percent of all annual plant biomass. That may not sound like much until you realize those 320 million trees release 0.77 to 1.09 billion tons of CO₂ every year as they decay.
That’s almost as much carbon as wildfires release from just live plant material. And while wildfires still dwarf lightning in total emissions (about 5.85 billion tons annually when you include deadwood and soil), the number of tree deaths caused by lightning is rapidly rising.
Most climate models predict an increase in lightning frequency due to climate change. That means more trees will be struck and lost, which means more carbon will be released into the air.
We are responsible for climate change, but left to its own devices, climate change itself can become self-sustaining. There might come a point where researchers will have to start factoring the effects of lightning strikes into climate models, which will likely paint an even more discouraging picture.
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