The climate crisis is scary, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it has brought us a matching vocabulary. Scientists and journalists alike are talking about the effects of global warming in frightening terms, and in the spirit of the Halloween season, here’s a sampling of some of the spookiest.

Along the East Coast, encroaching saltwater is killing trees at their roots and turning wooded areas into marshes. Dead trees are left wading in the Chesapeake Bay, sometimes turning a ghostly shade of white.

These arboreal graveyards are called “ghost forests.” No joke, that’s the technical term used in academic papers.

A “zombie fire” that just won’t die is a real thing, and it all starts when a wildfire hibernates over the winter. The embers continue smoldering in the roots of old-growth trees for months, sealed in by a thick layer of moss and snow.

Come spring, the ground thaws, and the fire roars back to life aboveground. In science-speak, this is a “holdover fire.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a creature more susceptible to global warming than corals. When an underwater heat wave strikes, it can lead to massive “bleaching events” that transform a coral reef’s rainbow of colors into a monochrome white “coral skeleton”.

“Coral skeleton” also happens to be a fitting description for the underwater necropolis of a bleached reef.

Ghost forests, zombie fires, coral skeletons, oh my!

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By Kate Yoder Art by Amelia Bates

This Halloween, scare your friends with some climate crisis vocab

In the spirit of a season that’s as spooky as climate, we’re digging up an article for you each week in October.

This Halloween, scare your friends with some climate crisis vocab

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