I was by twist of fate for a short trip in northern Germany, and it might be interesting for people to see some kind of landscape that may not be common in most of the US.
To wit:
The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Insects, weather, meteorites, climate, birds and/or flowers. All are worthy additions to the bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us. |
All along the northern boreal sides of the continents there are wide plains: Canadian (Laurentian) Shield, Russia, Siberia. North-central Europe as well has a wide expanse of plains ranging from the atlantic seaboard into Russia. As the Ice Ages receded, the sea level rose and it rained a lot on these circumboreal plains, and so the water did not find it very easy to escape. In all the waterlogged low places on the plains, moors grew. More specifically, such wetlands are subdivided according to the hydrological status they have. When water just accumulates in a low place, in quantities insufficient to form lakes, one would form marshes and other forms of low lying wetlands. Plants can grow in these in quantities enough to form organic layers — dead plant material decomposes only very slowly under water cover —, but the water would have connection to the regional mineral substrate, allowing it to get nutrients from there. However, when the climatic conditions allow plant material to accumulate substantially enough, the land surface can slowly raise itself up — the living plants begin to live as it were on a pile of the accumulated dead plant matter. When that happens, as water doesnt flow very much upwards, the growing moor can lose contact to the ground water and the to mineral nutrient sources through it. Then, the moor gets its water only by the copious rainfall. Such moors are called raised bogs, and they still today cover vast areas in Canada and Siberia. They also used to cover a large amount of the north-central european plains. Since the water comes only from rain, it is extremely poor in nutrients, as nutrients do not evaporate with water into the air; and it can only contain what it scavenges from airborne dust. So, the water in such raised bogs is so poor that only very few highly specialised plants can live there: typically mostly mosses, especially sphagnum mosses. Further, the dead plant (moss) matter that decomposes in the water, sets free intermediate decomposition products — the so called humic acids — that make the bog water acidic, further restricting its fertility. They also colour bog water dark brown to black.
So. there is a thick cluster of large former rain bogs in the upper left (northwest), at the coast. I grew up at the edge of one of them, the “Teufelsmoor”, and since I was there by chance, I took a few photos. Before I show them, I’d like to point out that such bogs were no-go areas before modern times: and if you look at how much of them were bundled right behind the coast: It was quite difficult to actually reach the coast from the inland in medieval times. This went so far that the Frisians settled along the coast in complete isolation from the Saxonians on the Inland side of the moors. When the feudal aristocrats did reach the coast they were quite surprised to find people there, and those people were equally surprised that they were suddenly asked to pay “taxes”. That created a lot of history. But enough talk. How does it look like there?
Like this — it is now a large area of extensive dairy farming land. All the moors, 99% of them have been drained in the modern age. Still, under all of this lies peat — no sand or any mineral soil; peat can be burned, and although this moor had eight to ten meters of peat thickness, most of it has been mined out and burned in the cities, and the rest drained and settled. Ours was so big however that in the last central area peat was still left when it became uneconomic. Peat was then mined for horticultural use until in 2012, the last peat mining stopped and the last central area was taken under protection and renaturalization efforts started. That is where we went.
Notice the absence of trees. With contact to groundwater, trees can still live and from a special kind of feet-in-the-water forest (a cold-water everglades); but in oligotrophic and acid rain-only bogs, trees can not survive. Neither, normally, grasses. Both trees and grasses effectively pull water out of the ground and into the air, and the process of rebuilding a bog is a struggle between the accumulation and the evaporation of waters by the plants.
An added problem under modern conditions is aerial deposition of nutrients. This is very hard to fight. Trees and grass win if they get nutrients, and the simple car traffic in all the lands around puts enough NOx into the air that then rains into here to make it hard for the bog to reestablish.
Meanwhile, people can use one footpath through the terrain which is open three months of the year (outside of breeding times, and not in winter, its dangerous to break into the partially iced bog).
In the evening we came out of the protected area, back into the main dairy land. But even here the land is still wetland and it is a refugium for many rare and threatened species. The farmers dont care a lot that it is so but there is a growing understanding that the land has value beyond the dairy output, which in any case cannot compete with EU maximized agroindustrial areas.
So this was this. The wildlife is returning into this area. Like, the muskrat, the nutria, and the raccoon :) I wonder what else will settle there. It is home to the viper, to a special kind of ant which has quite a potent sting, and wolves are also back in the county, although I dont think they like wet feet. For the moment, it is a refuge for waterland birds.
Land and people have shaped each other.
Now It's Your Turn
What have you noted happening in your area or travels? As usual post your observations as well as their general location in the comments.
Thank you.
*******
"Spotlight on Green News & Views" will be posted every Saturday at noon Pacific Time and every Wednesday at 3:30 Pacific Time on the Daily Kos front page. Be sure to recommend and comment in the diary.
*******
|