Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
In Kay Nielsen’s illustrations for the Brothers Grimm story of Hansel and Gretel, the deep woods are full of secrets. The trees are towering, gnarled, and knotted. Their canopies, crunchy and brown, blot out the sky.
On the ground, clusters of ferns unfurl around tree roots; there are patches of grass, and verdant trees studded with blooms. In a glen, of course, sits that devilishly tasty house built from bread and cakes.The woods are a character in the story. They are thick, tall, and deep—so much so that the young duo could wander them for days. Their allure, and a dash of horror, comes from the fact that they are unknown, and maybe unknowable.
In 2018, they aren’t many truly unknown corners of the globe—few places are pristine and untraveled the way they might be described in a fairytale. Still, dense clusters of primary forests—where trees have grown, for ages, largely undisturbed—exist in patches of the Amazon basin, Southeast Asia, and Canadian and Siberian Taiga. Slivers of Europe are still luxuriant with trees, too, and very old ones at that. But they’re dwindling.
A team of researchers, led by Francesco Maria Sabatini of Berlin’s Humboldt‐Universität, recently set out to map exactly where those oldest, least-disturbed forests are, and how many of them are left.
Since focusing on utterly untrammeled forest would have yielded a very brief list, the team took a broader view. They reviewed 17 years’ worth of studies on primary forests, which they took to include any tracts that were “primeval, virgin, near‐virgin, old‐growth, [or] long‐untouched.
”When they analyzed that data, the researchers found that most of the primary forests—at least those for which they had records—sprouted in Finland, or on the Carpathian or Balkan mountain ranges that slice across Romania and Bulgaria. Even where they’re most plentiful, these aren’t huge or especially numerous. Known primary forests account for just 0.7 percent of Europe’s forest area, discounting Russia, the scientists write in a new paper describing their results. So, unsurprisingly, these are small parcels—the median was 24 hectares, or roughly 0.09 square miles—largely scattered in northern latitudes, far from…
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