The Latest Cherry Blossom Season In 1200 Years Is Due To Climate Change.
If you’ve had the opportunity to get to know Japan , you’ve already come across the beauties of cherry blossoms. The country is known for this. The cherry tree refers to several species of fruit trees in a temperate climate. Most of these plants originate from Asia. Some of them are still fruitful, while others are producers of noble wood.
And for over a thousand years, cherry blossoms have made the country’s spring fragrant, in addition to always showing the transient beauty of nature. However, currently, these flowers are also a reflection of climate change.
This year, after Japan had an exceptionally hot spring, Kyoto was colored earlier than expected. To date, this is the first flower city Cherry in more than 1200 years.
This period of time is known from imperial court documents and ancient diary entries about the nation’s cherry blossom festivals, which go back in time to AD 812. March 1409.
Cherry blossoms
Over the centuries, the longstanding tradition of cherry blossom viewing has grown from an aristocratic fantasy to an accessory to Japanese life.
Every year, Kyoto residents perform “hanami” under the cherry trees to see how hundreds of varieties of flowers, white and pink, bloom. While flowers begin to bloom in Kyoto in March, full bloom historically takes place around April 17th. But already in the last century, that date changed to the 5th of April.
This year, before April even arrived, full flowering had passed. On March 26, authorities announced that the cherry trees in Kyoto were in full bloom.
“Evidence, such as the timing of cherry blossoms, is one of the ‘proxy’ historical measurements that scientists look for to reconstruct the climate of the past. In this case, this ‘proxy’ is telling us something that long-term, quantitative and rigorous climate reconstructions have already told us. That the global warming we are witnessing today is unprecedented for millennia,” said climate scientist Michael Mann.
Early flowering
The Japanese mountain cherry blossom alone has been carefully detailed 732 times since the ninth century. This is the longest and most complete record of a seasonal natural phenomenon anywhere in the world.
The data show that, since the 1830s, the Japanese mountain cherry tree began to bloom earlier and earlier. Between 1971 and 2000, specifically this tree, bloomed an average of one week before all previous averages recorded in Kyoto.
Although these data are from only a single family of cherry trees in Japan , more recent records made on cherry trees from 17 taxa also found similar rates of change. Over the past 25 years, these other species began to bloom 5.5 days earlier, on average. According to scientists, this is mainly due to the higher temperatures in February and March.
