In a secluded valley in southern Chile, a lone alerce tree stands above the canopy of an ancient forest. Green shoots sprout from the crevices in its thick, dark trunks, huddled like the pipes of a great cathedral organ, and water streams down its lichen-streaked bark on to the forest floor from bulbous knots in the wood.
“It was like a waterfall of green, a great presence before me,” said the climate scientist Jonathan Barichivich, 41, of the first time he encountered, slow-growing conifers native to the cold, wet valleys of the southern Andes.
