Photo Credit: chad_k
John Harte is an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
In the mid-1980s, before global warming came to be recognized as fact by most scientists, Dr. Harte wondered how rising temperatures would affect plants.
John Harte: My idea at that time was, well, the best way to really learn what is going on was to heat up an ecosystem and see what happens. And the work up to that point involving climate manipulation was really all done in little growth chambers where you would take a potted plant and subject it to different temperatures. And I wanted to look at whole ecosystem processes on a large scale.
So Harte and his team went to a sub-alpine meadow in rural Colorado – a place carpeted with flowers each summer. The scientists built towers and strung a cat’s cradle of cables between them. Then they hung electric heaters from the cables. In 1990, they flipped a switch and have been heating the meadow ever since.
The aim of the study is to mimic a world that’s two degrees Celsius warmer than the world we live in. Many climate scientists predict that Earth will warm by at least this much in the next 50 years. Some findings from the first 14 years of Harte’s experiment – on our next edition of Earth and Sky.
Our thanks to the National Science Foundation – where discoveries begin.
Our thanks to:
John Harte, Professor
Energy and Resources Group
University of California
Berkeley, CA
