Forests of Mount Everest

Here's a recent image of the Monongahela National Forest; is it what the Himalayas might look like around 2400 AD?

I just finished reading John Jerome's On Mountains. Jerome, a moderately successful author probably best known for Truck: On Rebuilding a Worn-Out Pickup and Other Post-Technological Adventures, used to edit Skiing magazine but later in life became a sort of more intimate, New England John McPhee.

In any case, On Mountains* includes a passage about montane plant life and, in a mid-1970s moment where concerns about global warming were hardly well-known, describes an interesting scenario about its consequences:

Disaster fans are fond of pointing out that a rise of only a very few degress in worldwide temperature would melt the ice caps, causing flooding of most of our major seacoast cities. Mountain lovers might take some small comfort from the realization that however disastrous that flooding would be in the short run—removing great quantities of useful land from our inventory—nevertheless, a subsequent development would restore at least some of the damage. A temperature change sufficient to melt the ice caps would also raise the timberline—worldwide—above the heights of the tallest peaks. It would take several hundred years to happen, granted, but the forest would inevitably climb right on up and conquer the same bleak and rocky peaks that the mountain climbers covet so dearly. Better make that several thousand years, to give time for the dawdling millimeter-by-millimeter process of soil building to permit the ascending forest a foothold. That same time scale won't do much for the inundated residents of New York and Tokyo, but compared to most mountain processes, it will happen quickly enough to be almost reassuring.

I'm not sure about how good Jerome's science is here, but it is an intriguing idea that one day you'd have dense forest canopy in zones where most animal life can only exist for a few hours, and where nearly any mountaineer whose last name isn't Viesturs needs bottled oxygen just to remain conscious.

* On Mountains is an excellent introduction to all things montane but, like most Jerome books, long out of print. I got my circa-1978 copy at the Rockville branch of Second Story Books, whose thousands of feet of used books are worth a side trip for anyone who has a few spare hours during a visit to D.C.

Photo credit.