English majors finally vindicated
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So detailed were his musings about blooms that scientists have been using Henry David Thoreau's journals to track global warming, and its effect on spring's arrival. In conjunction, they've also been referring to a Lowell, Mass. photo from May of 1868. It shows a cemetery filled with barren branches, spring having not yet sprung that year.
Using distinctive limb shapes as points of verification, Boston University biologist Richard Primack took a picture of the same site (on the same date) in 2005. Flowers burst everywhere.
Primack's collaborator, Abe Miller-Rushing, artfully states the implication, "What's amazing about the photo is that it puts it in visual terms. You can tell someone that spring is coming earlier than it did in Thoreau's day, but to see it puts it in a whole other world."
Since 2005, records have been accumulating that show plants blossoming seven to ten days earlier than usual ("usual" being those horse-and-buggy days). Birds have been singing an even two.
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