The Lost Forest of Mount Lico: The Scientists Who Explored a Hidden World

It’s difficult to ascertain the damage that climate change has caused simply because there are so few places on the planet where we are not found.  Human intervention creates artificial change, so in order to work out the real impact of climate change, you need to find somewhere pristine, somewhere we have never been.  That’s quite difficult, considering the billions of us that have spread like a virus over the surface of the Earth! However, Mount Lico was identified by Julian Bayliss (Oxford Brookes University) as a place of special scientific interest by using Google Earth of all things. Image

He recognised Mount Lico as an inselberg – an isolated small mountain that rises, as if by magic, from a virtually level plain.  Think Uluru in Australia, probably the most famous example of this kind of geographical formation.  He spotted that the land round the mountain was heavily agriculturalized but atop its sheer rock walls of up to 700 metres, was a pristine forest covering about 30 hectares (74 acres).  In a scientific version of Let’s put on a show he gathered a group of unpaid scientists to go with him to Mozambique to study Mount Lico’s landforms and vegetation.

The film below was directed by Orlando von Einsiedel and tells the story of both the climb and the study.  It appears on the Nobel Prize YouTube channel. I am not going to do a spoiler alert - find out what they discovered by watching the short documentary.  I will say, though, that I was struck by how genial Julian Bayliss was, and I thought that, if this were ever made into a film, Martin Freeman would be brilliant as him!  I know, I know, I should be focusing on the content…