Monarch butterflies migrate 2,000 miles every year to spend the winter in a small mountain forest in Mexico, but this could end within the next 50 years. At first, farmers were cutting down the trees in order to clear the land, but this has finally been stopped. Now it’s been discovered that climate change may eventually kill off the oyamel fir trees that the butterflies cling to during the winter.
In The Independent, Steven Connor quotes researchers Karen Oberhauser and Townsend Peterson as saying that, “?When current oyamel distribution was included in models to be projected to future climates, none of the present wintering sites was predicted to be suitable in 50 years’ time.”
The amazing migration of the Monarch has evolved since the last ice age. In the spring, millions of them leave Mexico and fly back to the U.S. and Canada. Then in September, after 4 or 5 new generations have been born, they somehow know how to find their way back to the same Mexican forests that their ancestors came from. Sometimes they even go to the same tree. But what will happen when it’s not there anymore?
One of the forces driving global warming is the Sun?but what’s going on with the Sun right now?
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