To get to work in the summertime, Douglas Larson, an affable 46- year-old botanist from the University of Guelph in Ontario, hikes to the top of a steep cliff, straps on a harness, and leaps into the abyss.
The cliff he jumps from is part of the Niagara Escarpment, a meandering wall of limestone and dolomite that begins near Niagara Falls, then wends its way north, passing within miles of the Guelph campus on its way to the Bruce Peninsula, which juts into Lake Huron; from there the escarpment hooks around Lake Michigan and turns south for 496 miles before petering out 125 miles north of Chicago. Formed 450 million years ago, the escarpment was once the edge of an ancient sea that sat roughly where the Great Lakes sit today, making it of obvious interest to a geologist or perhaps a paleontologist. The reason it is of interest to a botanist, however, is that on its ancient, harsh, inhospitable face is the most extensive and undisturbed old-growth forest east of the Rockies.
Larson and his colleagues have found that the forest is an ecosystem unlike anything growing on the horizontal parts of Earth. It is dominated by the eastern white cedar, a tree that lives only 90 years or so on the ground but, as Larson has discovered, has reached 1,600 years on his cliffs. Stunted and twisted, often growing upside down, the trees of the escarpment are some of the slowest-growing plants in the world. The researchers have also found that among the other strange residents of the cliffs are organisms that live inside the rock--organisms normally found in places like frigid Antarctic plains or infernal Middle Eastern deserts. To top it off, it seems that this forest, sitting smack-dab in the middle of an industrialized area of 7 million people, may provide a record of climate patterns dating back more than 2,700 years, potentially offering desperately needed answers to questions of global warming.
Small wonder, then, that Larson, along with dendrochronologist Pete Kelly (My tree-ring guy, as Larson fondly describes him) and the varying gaggle of graduate students that make up Larson’s Cliff Ecology Research Group, is willing to spend most of his summers garbed in helmet and harness. Larson, in fact, considers himself one fortunate fellow. Before his cliff work he had spent a decade studying lichens, but in the mid-eighties money for that line of research began drying up. Larson’s rescue came in the fall of 1985, when an obstreperous graduate student named Steven Spring came into his life, looking for a research project in ecology to use for a master’s thesis.
