41–50 of 285 posts
Possibly worth remembering: Iceland (and Greenland, where the vikings hung on until the fourteen hundreds) had significantly warmer climate a milennium ago.
This is the only one I found, which doesn't seem to indicate a significant change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find quite interesting how we plan on terraform and colonize Mars when we can't even grow trees on Iceland.
In fairness, the article does mention several dedicated individuals; and who knows, they might inspire others - "many hands make light work".
For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland. Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in. Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's nativ…
I agree, you'd have to carefully protect your trees until they reach a reasonable size that they can hold their own. Sheep will definitely prevent reforestation, although they are less likely than goats to harm saplings of a certain size.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just another devastated landscape of Europe, it's the single most naturally devastated landscape on the entire continent. The National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavík has a permanent exhibition on the subject that I highly recommend. Since colonization a little over a millennium ago most of the topsoil has been washed out to sea, wast swaths of the country that used to be fields or forests are now just bare r…
>it's the single most naturally devastated landscape on the entire continent. Isn't half of it technically on another continent?
For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland. Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in. Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's nativ…
There is actually a similar problem in the Northeastern United States. Deer are overpopulated (in my area 6x traditional level) because they have no predators and hunting is restricted. The deer eat all of the hardwood saplings. In many mid-Atlantic forests there are very few 10-20 year old hard wood trees, they don't survive the deer.
> As a result, Iceland is a case study in desertification, with little or no vegetation, though the problem is not heat or drought. About 40 percent of the country is desert, Dr. Halldorsson said. “But there’s plenty of rainfall — we call it ‘wet desert.’” At first I thought it was an error to call an area that gets plenty of rain a desert. I thought desert was strictly defined by the amount of rainfall. But maybe th…
The etymology of the word (think deserted island) would imply it has more to do with the lack of life than the reason for a lack of life.
from Latin desertus, from desero (“abandon”)
From dē- (“away, from”) + serō (“I bind, join”).
From Proto-Italic sizō, from Proto-Indo-European si-sh₁-, the reduplicated present of *seh₁- (“to sow”).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/desert#Etymology_3
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find quite interesting how we plan on terraform and colonize Mars when we can't even grow trees on Iceland.
In fairness, the article does mention several dedicated individuals; and who knows, they might inspire others - "many hands make light work".
For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland. Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in. Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's nativ…
>> It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in. It's an exception and not the rule, as you're saying, but I know of at least a few spots in the Rocky Mountains in the US where farmed cattle graze openly and property owners have to let them. The ones I'm thinking of I think became that way because it was a permanent condition of the sale of th…