June 30, 2012 — andyextance

Nature’s beauty means different things to each of us – but undoubtedly it burns some images onto our souls. Our favourite scenery is less constant than we sometimes suppose, changing from day to day and season to season. But the slowest changes can be the most heartbreaking, eventually robbing us of our favourite landscapes.

Some destructive changes you might consider man-made, for example city sprawl overflowing, and some natural, such as coastal erosion. Landscape losses brought by global warming are a curious mixture of these two – humanity somehow pushing nature into a more savage mood.

In the two and a half years since I started this blog, I’ve often reported on science’s efforts to monitor how climate change is affecting landscapes in different parts of the world. In this week’s blog entry I’ve decided to bring together pictures indicating what their work has told us – you can click on the pictures to read the original blog posts.

With the Arctic changing most rapidly as the world warms, it’s one of the most studied areas, and so its striking environment features highly. But if you look enough at your favourite landscapes, and at when its more regular changes happen, it’s likely you’ll already be able to see the signs of a slow and potentially troublesome revolution in progress.