Saving Japan's exceptionally rare 'snow monsters'
bbc.com

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136 points

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1659447091

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3 months ago

13 comments

acrooks ・ 3 months ago

You can find these in western Canada too: https://www.elitejetsetter.com/snow-ghosts-big-white/amp/

shinymark ・ 3 months ago

I visit Yamagata every year. I love how in Japan each region has their own specialties, it makes it fun to travel within the country. It would be sad if the snow monsters disappear.

I usually visit in the summer. The mountains are incredibly verdant. I love riding my bike there. Just watch out for the heat at that time - bring plenty of Pocari Sweat!

Bjartr ・ 3 months ago

I wonder how many things like this technically exist but which simply don't have the necessary circumstances to exist on earth near humans by complete chance.

bamboozled ・ 3 months ago

I sheltered at the base of these things once, we reached the summit and the wind became quite intense. It was too cold and windy to get our skins off to ski down. We couldn’t see anything either. We huddled in the hollows that formed around the downwind side around the base and got changed over and then Ski’d down. In hindsight it probably wasn’t dangerous as we were dressed for it, but it was scary, the wind was truly formidable. We lost a few items that flew away.

They are enormous in real life and it’s amazing the trunks don’t break as they sway in the wind.

Worth seeing in real life if in the area.

crazybonkersai ・ 3 months ago

These are common in northern Finland as well. The phenomenon is called "tykkylumi" in Finnish.

kyleblarson ・ 3 months ago

Big Mountain ski area in Montana has tons, as do mountains all over the world. When I saw this headline my first thought was "clickbait headline to push climate doomerism". The BBC did not disappoint.

  • quesera ・ 3 months ago

    There's no doomerism in the article.

    It's just documentation of change, with a reference to temperature trends, and to another major cause (which they do not suggest, but might also be related to temperature change, as it is thought to be in other locations).

    The trees are famous, and important to local tourism. It's a story.

  • acdha ・ 3 months ago

    What makes it “doomerism” other than being inconvenient for your political beliefs? Reading the article, it’s a pretty anodyne statement of facts with researchers methodically showing a combination of factors making a culturally-significant phenomena less common than in the past.

  • ffsm8 ・ 3 months ago

    Such a statement needs a citation, I don't believe you've got 20feet /6meter large trees being completely frozen like in the image of the article but I've never visited the area before.

    I suspect you're just talking about small trees frozen over,which are indeed very common (1-3m). The habitat for trees being frozen like that just generally comes with strong winds all-year-round, which hampers their grows.

    That's what made the Japanese ones special in the eyes of the people that were interviewed for this article - the gargantuan trees looking like monsters because of the size of the trees

    > In the 1930s, we saw juhyo five to six metres [16-20ft] across," Yanagisawa says. "By the postwar decades, they were often two to three metres [7-10ft]. Since 2019, many are half a metre [1.6ft] or less. Some are barely columns."

    > The cause is twofold, says Yanagisawa: a warming climate and a forest under attack. The host tree, Aomori todomatsu, suffered a moth outbreak in 2013 that stripped its needles. Bark beetles followed in 2015, boring into weakened trunks. Yamagata officials report that around 23,000 firs, about a fifth of the prefectural side's stands, have died. With fewer branches and leaves, there is little surface for snow and ice to cling to.