Why We Find Rainforests in Unexpected Places

okay so i'm back in the woods because today i'm talking about forests or more specifically rainforests you see even for somebody like me who studies the environment there's still nothing cooler than the idea of a jungle absolutely brimming with plant and animal life and i mean in a lot of ways they are the pinnacle of life on this planet containing an estimated three million species which for comparison is over a million more species than is estimated to live in the oceans but having lived essentially my whole life here somewhere in upstate new york rainforests have always been more of something that you read and watch videos about rather than actually go to see an experience or at least that's what i assumed for my whole life but here's what we need to keep in mind things in nature are never so simple and as it turns out the world hosts some pretty spectacular environments even some rainforests tucked away in some places you'd never expect okay so first things first we got to define what exactly a rainforest is the only problem is that like virtually every other concept in ecology rainforests are made up in reality forests will grow wherever there's enough water in circulation but also far beyond this threshold leaving some forests on the drier end of things and others far wetter where exactly we draw the line between what's considered a forest and what's considered just a regular forest is completely arbitrary so to get a better sense of how much rain true rainforests really receive we can take a look at an average global precipitation map and find some of the most well-known examples like the amazon to use as a metric here we can see the amazon of today occupies five and a half million square kilometers of south america roughly coinciding with this orange to red layer signifying around 2 000 millimeters of rain per year though the deeper into the forest we look rainfall peaks in these purples to even light yellow areas signifying upwards of 3 600 millimeters of water per year in some spots but i think it's safe to say the amazon is a bit of an anomaly here more than anything what this map shows us is just how water-rich this region is and explains why the amazon river discharges more water than any other river on earth and by a wide margin so if this is what we use to judge all other rainforests by then everything will simply pale in comparison even moving on to the river with the second highest discharge the congo river looking at the actual rainfall levels that feed it shows us a significantly drier environment despite hosting what's widely considered to be the second largest rainforest on the planet this area falls mostly within this red to pink color range between 1400 to 1800 millimeters of rain per year and overall the congo rainforest appears to offer a more realistic metric for judging other rainforests against but okay just to be sure the third greatest river by discharge is the ganges bringing us to the third and final major rainforest on earth the south east asian rainforest here we can see the historic size of this forest sits within a similar range of anywhere above 1400 millimeters though with peaks at upwards of 4 000 millimeters of rain annually in some places what this all shows us is that places we can all agree to be legitimate big rain forests tend to correspond with areas that receive any more than 1400 millimeters or 55 inches of precipitation per year isolating this color range on our map we'll see that these degrees of rainfall are concentrated mostly within the tropical areas of the globe giving rise to the world famous tropical rainforests as well as numerous smaller but nevertheless equally interesting ones like those spanning across central america the atlantic rainforest of brazil the west african rainforests to the mountain rainforests of east africa following along to madagascar throughout all the melee archipelago even to the very tippy top of australia but then you've probably noticed there are some areas beyond the tropics within the temperate latitudes where similar degrees of rain can fall this in turn supports several cases of what we'd call temperate rainforests and it's here that we truly start getting into some unexpected places to understand why though we're going to need to take a step back and look at the earth's climate system and wind patterns as a whole like this we can see that unlike their tropical counterparts which benefit from the continual intake of warm air thanks to their position around the equator temperate latitudes instead receive air from above and below some of which is dry some of which carries humidity some of which is hot some of which is cold and through their mixing weather becomes far less predictable here like this the only way for places at temperate latitudes to secure as much rainfall as the tropics is to literally force the water to come out of the air to see what i mean we can take a closer look at the pacific coast rainforest which clings to the far northwest of north america stretching all the way from the tall forests of california spanning through oregon and washington even into the canadian province of british columbia and all the way to alaska this is widely recognized as the largest temperate rainforest on earth a look back at our precipitation map shows this narrow region receives rainfall mainly in the order of this orange color equal to about 2 400 millimeters of rain a year this reliable amount of rain is in turn what's supported the growth of such amazing forests like the redwoods of california after all to sustain trees this size requires a lot of water the further north you go the shorter the trees get but the forests are nonetheless equally rainy preserved in major parks like redwood national park in california olympic national park in washington the great bear rainforest in british columbia and the tongass national forest in lower alaska although temperatures here may drop much further than in the tropics this amount of rain has nonetheless produced an undeniable abundance of vegetation which in turn has attracted a great deal of wildlife but something that can't be ignored is just how narrow of a corridor much of this forest is relegated to being cramped between the pacific ocean to the west and the rocky mountains to the east as it turns out this is really the only way temperate rainforests can exist as the moist air over the water is blown ashore where coastal mountains cause the air to rise and cool forcing the water to condense out of the air and fall as rain altogether this is called the orographic effect a process so necessary to the formation of temperate rainforest that we will literally only find them where mountains sit directly next to big bodies of water that's why exploring more of the american coastline we'll find similar degrees of rainfall being brought to the southwestern coast of south america within a region known as patagonia while the wind in the tropical regions tends to blow east to west in the mid-latitudes prevailing wind patterns change direction to blow west to east inundating the west coast of the continent with rain while leaving the eastern side rather arid while it might be hard to tell this has actually given rise to not one but two distinct forests in close proximity to one another at the top of this green area we'll find the valdivian rainforest clinging to both the andes and the coast here rainfall averages around 2400 millimeters per year supplying the land with more than enough water to support ferns bamboos and all the vegetation of a proper jungle this is often considered the second largest forest of its type and a more diverse one at that yet even further south we'll find the andes briefly interrupt the forest environment both with glaciers as well as exceedingly high altitudes but pretty soon the landscape returns to wide fjord lands where dense forests can again be found between the mountain peaks on our map we can see rainfall here reaches all the way into this brown color representing over 4 000 millimeters of rain a year feeding what's known as the magellanic forests given their extreme latitude and altitude of course not all of this forest can be considered rainforest but from our precipitation map we know at the very least that the conditions for temperate rainforest do occur here meaning they're likely exist in some corners of southern patagonia lush forests fed by more rain than what even the amazon receives what makes the valdivian and magellanic forests particularly amazing is that if we look back to the rest of the map we'll see they occur further south than any other landmass besides antarctica of course not only making these the southernmost rainforests on the planet but also the southernmost forests all together this also means these are the most recent lands to have been in direct contact with antarctica having actually been connected to each other only a few million years prior back in these times antarctica would have still been a green landscape featuring many of its own unique species of flora and fauna such as the notho phagus genus of trees thought to have been the dominant tree across most antarctic forests naturally some of these endemic species managed to colonize their surroundings in this case meaning extending the nothophagus genus and effectively the antarctic realm into nearby parts of south america which remained there even after the two land masses broke apart from one another antarctica as we should all know would eventually freeze wiping out all of its unique life forms like the northophagus forests under an all-encompassing blanket of ice but south america for the most part was spared from this icy fate and therefore was able to act as a refuge with these southern forests to this day still dominated by notho vegas trees preserving the last remnants of this lost environment the only other place these antarctic trees persist is new zealand which also kept in close contact with antarctica until rather recently while these southern alps may not be as tall as the andes we can see they nonetheless have a similar effect again catching the westerlies to extract moisture from the air producing upwards of 2 000 millimeters of rain on the west side of the island every year dominated by northophagus trees this forest closely resembles those of south america and together serve as a lens looking back in time to show us what ancient antarctic jungles could have looked like australia catches some of this western wind as well though without mountains anywhere nearly as tall as those of new zealand or patagonia the hills of the great dividing range capture far less water from the air that's why we can see there exists only sporadic areas mostly along the coast and across tasmania where enough rain is deposited to support pockets of eastern australian temperate rainforest except here the dominant trees are no longer of the nothophagus genus but rather eucalyptus signifying the change from fringe antarctic remnant environments back to the more established realm of australasia looking elsewhere in the southern hemisphere we'll see that africa is well the least southern of them all placing only a small part of land into the temperate zone some claim that's still enough to qualify the naisna and amatoly forests off the continent's south coast as temperate rainforests but i couldn't find any precipitation maps to back this up this means we've located all the temperate rainforests within the southern hemisphere and need to start looking back at the other half of the globe but before we go any further i first need to address the pretty glaring issue with this map this big square blocky cutout roughly in the shape of the caspian sea i'll be honest i don't know why this is here there's nothing else like this anywhere else on the map but sometimes that's just what you need to deal with when getting maps off the internet no worries though we're just going to have to take a look at a more detailed precipitation map for iran doing this we'll find this narrow strip of land that was left off our other map is actually where the el bruce mountains the tallest in the entire middle east catch the water coming off the caspian sea turning this into by far the rainiest part of the country with between 1500 to 2000 millimeters of rain annually this has given rise to the hurrkanian rainforest which sits nearly entirely surrounded by mountainous desert this name comes from the ancient title of this land hercania a place once famous for its environment and what kinds of wildlife it could support that's why the most common reference to this land throughout all of classical literature was for being the home of the hercanian tiger unfortunately these texts along with a collection of photographs and skins are all that remain of this once renowned tiger breed having lost nearly its entire natural range to human encroachment and desertification and only going extinct sometime in the last century included within the natural range of the hurkanian tiger was the southernmost corner of another large body of water here we'll find an almost identical situation where the black sea runs into the pontic mountains culminating in very high rainfall between lands that are now shared by turkey and georgia this falls within the ancient region known as kolkas which was a very well known place throughout the greek world and was eventually colonized by the ionians that's why it was here according to greek mythology to the colchis rainforest that it's said jason and the argonauts sailed to in order to recover the golden fleece and it's not hard to see why the greeks would have written about a place such as this as it undoubtedly must have seemed like the most exotic location within their world but if the caspian and black sea can supply enough water to sustain temperate rain forest surely the even larger mediterranean sea must be able to as well right well now we're starting to enter the main body of europe and here we'll begin to see the true toll centuries of industrialization and millennia of agriculture takes on a land for europe i think it'd be best if we bring up a bigger map where we can more clearly see the mediterranean transporting huge amounts of moisture to southern europe where it's caught by the alps and dinaric alps forming what can only be described as potential pockets of alpine rainforest within many valleys of these ranges but looking to google maps we can also see how much of these lands have been cleared to make way for farms and cities meaning finding any fully intact forests might be difficult before looking anywhere else in europe we can't go further without mentioning the gulf stream now i've talked about this several times in past videos at this point but for anyone new in basic terms what we're looking at here is an ocean current that brings warm water from the caribbean towards the northwest of europe this in turn drastically alters the climate of western europe bringing higher than average temperatures and excessive amounts of rain the first effects of this can be seen off the northernmost shoulder of spain in a region known as galicia here we'll find the fragas de ume maybe the only forest of its kind across the spanish countryside though it too has suffered from the extensive land development of europe leaving only scattered remnants of what used to be the further we follow the gulf stream the more the air cools and even more water falls out of the air over ireland and britain which both receive upwards of 2 000 millimeters of rain annually along their coasts but a look at google earth shows us again that the vast majority of these forests that once covered these islands have been thoroughly stripped away with these levels of rain there's no doubt that parts of ireland and britain could have supported temperate rainforests prior to man's arrival here but since then nearly all the land has been converted to farms with only very small fragments of these forests remaining hidden away within the scottish highlands but at least we have a pretty good idea of what these forests would have been like thanks to equal degrees of rainfall coming to the norwegian coast leaving a series of valleys or i guess fjords hosting coastal conifer rainforests as is the case with many of these here the extreme landscape made cutting down and occupying the land much harder helping to preserve entire valleys of rich forest we can only assume these would have shared a lot in common with those of the british isles but of course now we can never really know for sure and finally continuing to the northernmost reaches of the gulf stream we'll find iceland unfortunately it's here that we'll witness perhaps the furthest extent to which a land can be deforested when the first norse settlers arrived here some 1 000 years ago the great degrees of rainfall received along the southern coast produced a forest covering up to 40 percent of the island's surface of these forests it's likely that at least a portion of them would have grown where rainfall exceeds 1400 millimeters every year making even temperate rainforests a possibility here but the releasing of sheep and establishment of an agrarian society quickly ate away at the icelandic forests until the whole island was reduced to nothing more than grasses and moss with the woodlands now being just a distant memory i mean don't get me wrong iceland looks like an incredible place but it's still disappointing to think of what cool environments could have existed within the native icelandic forests that we'll never know about okay well i know i said iceland was the final extent of the gulf stream but that wasn't entirely true even further we'll find the south coast of greenland picks up precipitation at this reddish color or 1800 millimeters per year on par with what we've seen elsewhere but if you couldn't tell by just looking at greenland instead of feeding forests this water goes towards the building of greenland's massive ice sheets that's why if we look at a map of which parts of greenland are melting the fastest this shows the southeastern front of greenland as the only part that is in relative terms gained ice while the greatest amount of melting happens where less water is brought in that explains why along the western front of the island we can see that there still exists some lands spared from the ice most of this is barren rock scraped clean by the glaciers but where this gulf stream rainfall overlaps with exposed land this has miraculously led to the preservation of a single forest tucked within kengua valley and its surroundings this may in fact be the most isolated forest on the planet and as a result features a pretty meager level of diversity but just the idea that this forest even exists right up next to the ice sheet serves as a testament to just how extreme of an environment forest can be pushed to grow in so long as there's enough water okay well at this point we've just about gone full circle except well all of those examples are all still ridiculously far away from me and would be about as hard to get to as any other tropical rainforest so it's finally time to focus in here on the east coast of the united states here we can see patches of this pink and red that define the bottom limit of rain forests most of this falls in and around the state of louisiana supporting not a rain forest but rather by you a shallow wetland environment pretty similar to a rainforest and its degrees of diversity and productivity but is also its own thing entirely finally further north we'll see this small solid red area where the bottom of the appalachian mountains what are known as the blue ridge mountains can catch just enough moisture coming off the gulf of mexico to sustain the appalachian temperate rainforests spanning parts of north carolina south carolina tennessee and even into georgia these exist only in scattered instances where the valleys line up just right but thanks to a large portion of the mountains being preserved this has definitely left a few exceedingly lush forests buried somewhere within these ancient hills for all intents and purposes the appalachian temperate rainforest is the most solid example of a rain forest within my general vicinity but okay hear me out moving up the appalachians we can still see a series of just these pinkish spots showing instances of 1400 millimeters of rain each year all along the east coast are absolute lowest bound for rainforests and i couldn't help but notice one or two of these falls within new york not so far away from me so i had to take a closer look one last time what we'll find is that any rainfall map of the state shows parts of these mountains the adirondacks as well as even smaller parts of these hills the catskills are high enough to catch the moisture coming off lake ontario and lake erie and bring down over 1400 millimeters of precipitation each year surprisingly looking at both of these places on google earth we can see that these forested areas have been more or less preserved so is that it does new york have its own small rainforests well i'd say not really oh man hang on oh come on oh it's dark in here come can it can it adjust will it adjust [Music] all right there we go that's better well enough precipitation may fall in certain areas of the state if you knew anything about this place you'd know that a fair amount of that precipitation comes in the form of snow instead of rain in fact if we look at a snowfall map for the whole country we'll find this area of new york receives more than just about anywhere else other than maybe the upper peninsula of michigan making it one of the snowiest regions in the u.s snowfall peaks here at upwards of 200 inches of snow a year which translates into about 500 millimeters of rain or roughly a third of all the precipitation that comes down here does this make a rainforest or something else entirely well there's no real saying from the beginning of this video we've known that what we use to define rainforests is completely arbitrary and at the end of the day they're all just forests all i know is that sometimes when wandering through the woods out here you can come upon a place like this where the entire atmosphere of the forest changes you can actually feel the excess water around you and you get this unexplainable sense like you're in some other place so yeah sometimes i like to tell myself that even though i'm all the way up here in upstate new york if i just look hard enough i can find some rainforest in some pretty unexpected places you know that's why i like studying these sorts of things as oftentimes the closer you look the more you fight so before i truly make up my mind i might actually have to go out and visit these remote woods here in the middle of new york and decide for myself whether or not i think they deserve the title of rainforest so let me know if that's something you'd be interested in watching as you've all probably noticed i've started recording myself for parts of these videos and part of the reason why is so that i don't know i could expand the scope of what i talk about and do on this channel like going to places and talking about specific environments on top of that it's just easier it saves me time in the writing process because i'm no longer bound by whatever visuals i can make or find it saves me time in the editing process because i'm no longer combing through piles and piles of stock footage looking for just the right clip and it saves me time by cutting out needlessly animated portions of the video that's why these past few videos have taken me less than two weeks to make compared to my average three weeks or more i used to average per video so while i can't promise i'll be the best at this i can promise that i'll get better and you'll get more videos because of it if you'd like to help me in this endeavor to advance the channel there should be something on screen probably right about here that should take you over to my patreon where you can help support this whole operation other than that thanks for watching like subscribe and i'll see you next time whoa look at this guy whoa what are you doing oh man sorry

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 1,123,159

Rating: 4.923409 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro, forest, pacific, coast, rain, mountain, climate, california, redwood, oregon, washington, british, columbia, alaska, tongass, patagonia, amazon, brazil, south, america, north, antarctica, new, zealand, australia, temperate, tropical, rainforest, africa, congo, hyrcania, hyrcanian, caspian, colchis, turkey, pontic, norway, greenland, iceland, iran, appalachia, york

Id: oSOqJ5bRHx0

Length: 24min 29sec (1469 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Bem-ti-vi]

This video's a bit long, but does an excellent job of looking through some surprising rainforests - namely, temperate ones - hidden in corners of our planet.

[u/NicklovesHer]

Wow, thats solid work.