This is Scientific Americans' 62nd Science, I'm Emily Schwing.

The Boreal Forest is the largest terrestrial biome in the world.

It covers 14% of the land on Earth.

And today I'm here with my dogs on the north side of Denali National Park in Purser.

Come on!

What?

Come on!

I'm walking my dogs through the Boreal Forest.

It's also known as Taiga, it covers 1.3 billion acres of the Earth's surface.

This forest is actually really beautiful.

There's these black spruce trees, they're stumpy, sometimes they're really short and growing

in different directions.

There's lichen that hangs off of the dead branches, bright green lichen.

Today there's a skim of snow on the ground, over top of this feather moss that just covers

the forest floor.

There's a Megpie on a tree branch right in front of me.

Wildfire is a normal part of the life cycle for the Boreal Forest, but as the climate

warms, this ecosystem is becoming increasingly vulnerable.

That vulnerability risks turning this forest from a carbon sink into a carbon source.

When the Boreal Forest burns, it has the potential to release gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere.

In the global context, one of the reasons why Boreal Forests are really important is that

they store a lot of carbon, and much of that carbon is actually in the forest floor.

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