From the barren, rocky top of Mount Washington, thousands of people have looked over some of the Northeast’s last tracts of wilderness by day. Far fewer have observed the views at night, when the glow of settlements that have swelled in the centuries since the first observers stood on the Northeast’s loftiest peak is more apparent. On a clear night, you can make out the lights of Bretton Woods and Conway, N.H., St. Johnsbury, Vt. North Lewiston, Maine, and, far in the distance, Portsmouth, N.H. If you have excellent eyes, you may be able to discern the glow of Montreal and Boston over the arc of the horizon.

Though Mount Washington, like a fickle Greek god, throws notoriously wild weather at human beings, we are only now discovering that it may be more vulnerable than it appears. And perhaps the glow of cities increasingly visible from the peak symbolically suggests the growing effects of humankind on the mountain: We may be contributing to the demise of its stunning, lunar-like landscape of rocks, sedges, and delicate alpine flowers.

Mount Washington is the most prominent feature of the tiny, vestigial areas of alpine habitat in New England—part of some 13 square miles in the U.S. east of the Mississippi. Only 5 percent of the land on this planet is covered in alpine habitat, which is located only in high elevations above treeline and, in the Whites, areas with extreme weather. As the globe heats up, alpine ecosystems are becoming a focal point of research across the Alps, Alaska, and other ranges. Such ecosystems, which have adapted to extremes in wind, icing, snowfall, precipitation, and temperature, may also be one of our better bellwethers of habitat response to climate change.

“We know from research in the European Alps that in the last several decades there’s been an upslope movement in alpine ecosystems,” says Ken Kimball, AMC’s research director, who is now heading National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-funded research with the University of New Hampshire and the Mount Washington Observatory on climate change in the White Mountains. “The mountain’s climate is changing and here, there’s not much room for the alpine to move up.”

Because of the White Mountain National Forest’s proximity to major eastern cities, millions of people recreate in it every year. A large number of those come for views from bald summits and the stark, stunning alpine landscape of the Presidential Range and Franconia Ridge.

These alpine areas are relics from the last Ice Age. When the last glaciers retreated northward 13,000 years ago, they left seeds of alpine plants, which were mostly overtaken by the forests that ensconce New England today. Now, only islands of alpine flora remain, as the rest of the Northeast became more temperate. When European settlers came to New England, they planted crops, converted forestland into dairy pastures, and logged many of the hardwoods, though the alpine areas were largely spared. Despite more than a century of hikers’ and researchers’ explorations, the alpine ecosystem in the Northeast looks much as it did centuries ago and features very few structures or other obvious signs of human contact. While these areas are particularly significant to the hundreds of thousands of visitors who have enjoyed the views from the peaks, scientists are only now piecing together how they may endure—or not—under the stresses of climate change.

Climate Change: A Regional Picture
Amid the recent hype about climate change, it’s easy to lose sight of exactly why and how it is occurring. When plants carry out photosynthesis, from carbon dioxide in the air they create oxygen and hydrocarbons, which, after a few million years and complicated geological processes, can turn into oil and coal. Since the beginning of the industrial era, we have burned this plant matter and released millions of years’ worth of carbon back into the atmosphere in a relatively short period of time. Green-house gases aren’t all bad. It’s like the difference between good fats and bad fats: We need some in order to keep the planet from resembling an icebox, but not so many that Earth resembles an oven.

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