Remember this: What was, will be once again.
I am reading an episode in The Post and Courier/Pee Dee newspaper I grabbed from the hospital. The title of the article is "Hunting for hidden Ghost forests: What SC's spectral woodlands tell us about the future" and is written by Jonah Chester in the March 19-April 1, 2026 distribution.
Jonah Chester goes on to bring up the concept of spectral woods and ghost forests that give birth from coastal shores, estuaries, and tidal rivers. Fits my mythos of creepy southern forest with whispers and hoots of spooks. Is this a tale of dire warning? Most likely.
We would assume that everything of matter that doesn't have progeny, or flourishes will eventually disappear and die. Letting Nature take its course can mean in the long run Nature will begin to deteriorate to its fatal end. Whatever lives upon it will move on to higher ground in hopes of a way to maintain its survival and existence.
Jonah Chester goes on to talk about the rising sea levels that are generated by weather patterns known to the region that push the salt water inland. In walks the University of Virginia with a project that is trying to make a case for dead forest prevalence across South Carolina using artificial intelligence and satellite data.
One such data point in this study is a 350,000 acreage of land called the ACE Basin that boundaries by the Ashepoo, Combahee, and the Edisto. These dead zone locations are across South Carolina but perfuse near the coast.
This is where I should point out that South Carolina from the coast to the Sandhills use to be a large coral reef. Deep underground there is history. Divers pull it out the Charleston rivers all the time when they dive for shark teeth fossils.
When migrating people decide they want to move down for the weather, they need to fact check that location the residence is built on. We love a good subterranean termite especially when they float into the yard during floods to remodel the innards of a house with their form of mud artistry in the beams of the wall. Trust me. They are there.
Let us see if we can transverse a thought process and compound on Jonah Chester's article.
Yeung and his partners are using AI to analyze imagery that will identify dead tree species missed by traditional methods, confirm cause of death for the trees, consider the widespread impact on individual and collective data point locations, configuring ground truth validations, and collaborations.
Here in this excerpt, Henry Yeung, a lead author on the project states, "For example, if you have a drought eating the landscape first and it dries off the soil and then a storm surge hits, basically you don't have the groundwater storage to resist against the flooded salt water." (Chester B5)
Now mind you, the human termites have been digging all over the South for the Sands of Time without the thought God put it there, so maybe not remove it. Everyday I think about how the Earth is a structure run off of everything that compromises it. Humans are always uprooting a necessary part of the system and moving said thing somewhere else. All that activity leads to substances trapped in the ground coming to the surface and polluting what is above.
Now let us ask the current question. If this is an issue with saltwater eroding inland due to ocean acidification, climate change, pollution from a variety of sources, humans being humans with entitlement and the ability to not see their habits/actions are causing a lot of damage, what is going to happen when you slap a data center near that location?
Lets just imagine a textbook photo of erosion from the top of a mountain to the sea. One such event is the flood in North Carolina that took out a large area. This flood brought with it trickle down economics from the casebook in ecological destruction. Anything of a waste product is eroding down the slope. It has to go to the lowest point; river to ocean. Along that path things tend to settle here and there.
The article points out consistency is the one factor when elevation is plotted against a data set of dead trees. It begins to illustrate lower elevations will appear to have more dead trees than upland stands. In a 2020 study, Chester states, "once coastal forests succumb to the salt, they stop capturing carbon and begin releasing it instead." (Chester B5)
But why? Why does it do this? Salt seems to be a major vulnerability.
As I read further, here it comes.....
Chester writes, "Yeung said one of the project's goals is to provide a "common language" for policymakers to help address the growing issue. As he notes, it's difficult to come up with solutions when there's not a common data baseline to work from. He said potentially installing flow-control structures or flood gates along vulnerable corridors could help curb the ghost forests' spread." (Chester B5)
It all comes down to Law and Order, loss of land, habitat loss, and freshwater scarcity. Let's get back to the salt of the Earth on them roots.
When salt intrusion occurs in coastal areas, the ground stores organic compound rather than releasing it. Salt disrupts the soil structure and triggers microbial breakdown of old organic matter. What is the salt doing to the ground? What happens when all this stored up old organic matter is completely gone? Salt intrusion brings in sulfates. Sulfate-reducing bacteria activate and produce chemicals that dissolve iron-mineral bonds that previously held the carbon secure. Dissolved iron releases the carbon and it decomposes.
Soil stores carbon aggregates that keep the carbon-eating microbes away from the organic matter that is food. Microbes need detritus to survive and flourish. This is the basics of a forest floor. It needs the composting process of litter, soil humus, flora and fauna. This process gives rise to nutrients into the lower levels and soil. What happens when you have areas where the erosion from high to low is pushed by the tide that brings in the salty brine.
Pickled Earth.
Sodium ions replace things like calcium and magnesium from soil particles. This causes soil dispersion where aggregates break apart. These broken aggregates uncover and convert hidden carbon to oxygen. Bacteria and fungi are sensitive to salt. Moderate salinity stress can force them to consume more energy to deal with the osmotic stress of the salt. This results in increased microbe activity leading to higher rates of respiration that turns solid soil carbon into gas that is release into our good atmosphere.
Coastal environments store carbon because soil is anaerobic with low oxygen, bound to minerals, and it is wet.
Let us ask the question about them tree roots. If a tree is sitting in Earth that has a high salt content, what do we expect the tree to be in a state of? The surrounding environment of its roots are hypertonic relative to the cells inside of the tree. I don't know if you have taken a biology or chemistry class but they teach about solutions. Most plants and trees depend on turgor to move fluids in and out. Its like trees have a heart or kidney problem with all that salt. Trees aren't humans, but can you relate?
The salt concentration outside the root is higher than the solute concentration inside the root cell which cause the water to be drawn out of the roots. This water extraction leads to dehydration, water stress, and potential death aka osmotic stress or plasmolysis. Plasmolysis shrinks and pulls away the cell wall causing the cells to lose turgor pressure. You see this in house plants when they appear to wilt.
The tree experiences a condition called physiological drought. The tree can't access the water even if the soil is wet. This leads to disrupted nutrient uptake, root cell die-off, leaf burn caused by salt uptake that destroys tissues, and reduced growth. Now, go look at your potted plants. Are they okay? Check on your people.
Trees move, but slowly, and they can't run away fast enough from a spot that is a salt gestapo. The tree's internal environment becomes hypotonic. The solutes are lower relative to the surrounding salty soil. The tree is in a situationship with a hypertonic environment.
But how? How do you revitalize the trees that are stuck in this type of environment. Some of these areas are in places where isolation is the word.
I have read the different engineering ideas. It sounds more like the trees affected by being to close to the high salt areas would be swamped and efforts would be on the trees not affect yet. What could be done? Being nosy, I looked into it.
For salt-locked trees elevated/raised planting beds could be implemented. The trees could be elevated by building raised planters or berms which would improve drainage and prevent roots from sitting in saline water.
Small diversion ditches to redirect the high-salt stormwater runoff could be built to redirect the runoff away from the trees.
Constructing high-density fencing or plant dense evergreen buffers to block salt spray and high-speed winds from reaching delicate species. This would be eastern red cedar or wax myrtle.
Soil amendment management which would incorporate organic matter such as compost to improve soil structure, increase nutrient retention and water filtration in sandy, salt-affected soil. Activated charcoal can be used into the soil around the dripline to neutralize some salts.
The dripline is the outer circumference of the tree's canopy and is reduced on the seaward side while the foliage is denser and more developed on the sheltered, landward side. This gives rise to description being windswept or salt-pruned shaped. The tree can present as highly modified, asymmetric and stunted.
Fresh water can be used to flush or leach the salts out of the root zone periodically if there is adequate rainfall that doesn't occur soon after high exposure events such as a storm surge or heavy road salting. Interject a question here. Can salt poured on the ground in another place work its way out to the coast? Ergo, the salting doesn't happen that often but what about high salted areas when it comes to road salting like up North? What is there coastal forests like?
A system called a Gabion-Break can be engineered where porous woody breakwalls or gabion mats are placed to protect the coastlines and reduce wave energy that allow for health salt tolerant tree growth behind them.
At the rate that people like to cut down the Mighty Oak during clear cuts on swampy areas out in Charleston near Francis Marion Forest, species that are recommended as a first line solution are Live Oaks, Cabbage Palm, and Eastern Red Cedar. A second line of defense would be Southern Magnolia and Bald Cypress, or River Birch.
These tree types can be group planted to form a windbreak. Protecting existing root zones by using wood or wire fencing to avoid soil compaction and damage to the tree's dripline. Chemical control which would limit the use of fertilizers and pesticides near salt marshes to prevent runoff damage to the surrounding environment.
So these are some of "all the things". If anyone has other thoughts and prayers put that out into the Internet Ether.
As you can read, this is a problem. It has been a problem because it affects farmland that becomes barren. The land is returned to a salty marsh or open water. It affects freshwater stores as well. People don't want to believe that climate change is a thing, but everyday conditions show themselves as a loss that someone has to fix before its to late.
Should the word Climate Change be rebranded? Should it be something snazzy with a one word reference?
Why can't we go to the dessert and plant some trees? Live in bubbles under the sea? No, people want to spend their effort shooting off into Outer Space to live on another planet because they broke this one. I would be salty to Trees.
The further problem that exists is high salinity can lower carbon dioxide but long term the net effect will be loss of soil carbon stores and and increase greenhouse effects from coastal wetlands and local farmland. The Ghost Forest enters the chat because the freshwater depend trees start to die, the new organic carbon reduces the input in the soil, this in turns causes an upturn in decomposing plant matter that lead to an increase in net carbon emissions.
I wondered why we could go back to building a oyster bed reef like a barrier island to brunt the storms during high weather seasons for hurricanes.
This is an involved subject. Knowing this, how do you feel that a group of people running around in the woods is trying to solve our problems?
On behalf of the trees, they are a little salty about this.
~Courtesy of the AOFH~
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Sources cited:
Chester, Jonah. "Hunting for hidden Ghost forests. What SC's spectral woodlands tell us about the future." The Post and Courier/ PeeDee, 19 Mar-1 Apr. 2026, p. B5
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