Add your Article
- E Learning Jamaica
- E Learning in Jamaica WIN PRIZES and try our Fun Animated Games
- Results of GSAT are in schools this week
- 2014 GSAT Results for Jamaican Kids
- Finding the Past
- The Taming of the Cat
- Stone Tablet May Solve Maya Mystery
- Oldest Writing in the New World
- GSAT Exam Preparation Jamaica
- Tarrant High overcoming the odds
- 42,000 students will sit for the GSAT Exam in two weeks
- Scotiabank Jamaica Foundation Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) Scholarships
- GSAT Exams Jamaica Scholarships
- Results of GSAT are in schools this week
- 42,000 students will sit for the GSAT Exam in two weeks
- GSAT Exam Preparation
Slower Growth, Greater Warmth
Published: 07/02/2010
There seems little doubt that Earth is heating up. As temperatures rise, many people worry about how global warming may affect life on the planet. A long-term study in Central America gives one more reason for concern. Adult trees in a rain forest in Costa Rica grew more slowly in warm years than they did in cold ones. Such a shift toward slower-growing trees might make the climate warm up even faster. From 1984 to 2000, biologist Deborah A. Clark of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and colleagues measured the width of old trees in a 2-square-kilometer plot of rain forest at La Selva, Costa Rica. During the coolest years, a time period running from 1984 to 1986, the trees grew 81 percent faster than they did during a heat wave that struck in 1997. The trees also grew slowly in 1987, another warm year. In addition, scientists found that, during warm years, Earth's atmosphere contained less carbon dioxide produced by tropical land plants. Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas, which plants normally use up to make food. The new results reinforce how important trees are to the health of the planet and how devastating a continued rise in temperatures might be to their future—and ours.—E. Sohn
Slower Growth, Greater Warmth
