"The delicate balance of one of the planet’s largest natural systems for storing carbon depends on the humble black spruce tree."

"The dead black spruce looked like a collection of giant burned matchsticks standing tall above the gray landscape as far as Jennifer Baltzer could see. But here, at the edge of one of the largest areas of scorched forest that scientists have ever documented in Canada, what caught Dr. Baltzer’s attention was closer to the ground.

The spruce seedlings were gone.

Dr. Baltzer, a professor of forest ecology, was a few hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, where for over a decade she has studied the health of the black spruce and the boreal forests. It was a scorching late spring morning, and she and three of her students from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, were in the Northwest Territories to document what could grow from the ashes of the record-breaking fire season that had ravaged the forest almost a year earlier.

“Wow, it’s kind of crazy in here,” Dr. Baltzer said as she inspected the blackened landscape. She had never seen trees burn this soon after a previous fire."

Manuela Andreoni reports for the New York Times with photography by Bryan Denton Aug. 12, 2024. [2]