As you near Wilmington for your beach vacation, you take in the classic coastal Carolina scenery — tall longleaf pines, grassy marshes, and the wide Cape Fear River. But then something strange catches your eye: a forest of bare white tree trunks rising from the swamp like a field of bones. The eeriness of this ghost forest — a place where living woods have turned to watery graveyards — leaves you wondering, “What killed all the trees?”
The answer researchers with the University of North Carolina Wilmington found in the boneyard may surprise you.
For centuries, bald cypress trees thrived on the banks of the Cape Fear River and its tributaries. Bald cypress trees — ancient survivors — are not fragile. These giants can live for thousands of years, stretching to 120 feet tall and standing strong through hurricanes thanks to buttressed roots that prevent the tree from toppling in high winds. An hour away, cypress trees on the Black River are some of the oldest trees in the world with some in Three Sisters Swamp found to be aged at over 2,600 years using tree-ring dating in a 2019 study. But here along the Cape Fear River — like much of the East Coast — many of them are dying and leaving behind ghost forests.
The cost of ghosts
Ghost forests aren’t just spooky. They’re a warning sign. Remote sensing photos from a 2020 paper by Jessica Lynn Magolan and Joanne Nancie Halls show Smith Creek’s freshwater wetlands giving way to salt marsh. Old-growth freshwater swamps are engines of life. They shelter birds, fish and reptiles. They store vast amounts of carbon. Their roots absorb floodwaters, buffering nearby communities when hurricanes roar ashore…