The Chartreuse massif, the wettest in the Alps, is also suffering from global warming.

The walls of the Grande-Chartreuse Monastery rise imposingly in the heart of a national forest. Around the building located in Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse (Isère), about thirty kilometers north of Grenoble, the trees stand guard like immense sentinels.

But, behind this etched landscape, the trained eye will quickly spot the wooden skeletons among the spruce, fir, and beech trees. Trees sometimes more than a hundred years old, dead standing, some in a matter of weeks. "This one was still going strong three weeks ago," says Martin Deltombe, head of the Chartreuse sector for the National Forestry Office (ONF), pointing to a spruce stripped of its needles, near the monastery.

There's no doubt about it, this is the work of the bark beetle, a small beetle that ravages spruce trees in just a few weeks and whose exponential growth has been destroying entire sections of forests for several years. The insect, which feeds on the sap of spruce trees, settles under the bark and gradually dries the tree out. "The bark beetle has always existed in the forest, and the trees know how to fight it, by 'drowning' it in their sap," recalls Marjorie Guillon, director of the ONF Isère.

You have 84.86% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.