Why does this forest look like a fingerprint?

I'm in the middle of the countryside in Uruguay trying to find this. A forest shaped like a fingerprint. We're here because of a screenshot of Google Earth that somebody posted to Reddit.

In 2022, a Reddit user named tarek619 found “strange DNA-like forests spanning some 30 kilometers in Uruguay. ” I looked at the forest. I wasn't totally sure what was “DNA-like” about it, but it was strange.

And then I zoomed out. And saw that it was just part of a whole array of forests, all in mesmerizing designs. Then I zoomed out more.

Forests like this covered the entire country. But I couldn't stop looking at this one. It looked like a fingerprint.

From Street View, I could just barely make out what it was: Long rows of identical trees. If I wanted to see inside one of these forests, I would have to go see it for myself. So I went.

And discovered something much more complex than I expected. But it all started with one question: Why did this forest look like a fingerprint? Before I left, I started with some highly advanced research methods.

And I started reading. According to a Uruguayan government report, about 1 million of Uruguay's 17 million hectares of land are covered with pine and eucalyptus plantations. Tree farms.

Artificial forests. That's why they were planted in these rows of identical trees. Reading more, I learned that the majority of those trees are turned into pulp.

Not pulp like orange juice, pulp like wood pulp: Soft, wet, chemically-separated cellulose that becomes the main ingredient in making paper products: Printing paper, paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, anything. And according to the very first result on Google search, these forests were a “miracle. ” On a continent devastated by deforestation, Uruguay was one of the few countries where forest cover had actually expanded.

It sounded like a massive accomplishment. These strikingly arranged forests appeared to be part of some nationwide project. If it really was a miracle, I had to see it.

After three flights, to Miami and then to Lima, I have finally made it to Montevideo. I am sitting in traffic right now, waiting to pick up Faustina Bartaburu. Hey, how's it going?

She's a journalist based here in Montevideo. I'll be there in like 5 minutes. Between finding the forests on Google Earth and coming here, I'd connected with her to help us find experts in Uruguay.

Experts who could help us learn more about the forests. Starting with a representative from the forestry industry. That's “afforestation.

” Not reforestation, where trees are restored to a depleted forest, but where trees are planted in a place where no trees existed before. Just 40 years ago, these forests weren't here at all. In 1987, the Uruguayan government passed a law that protected the country's native forests, but also declared a “national interest” in developing new “forestry resources,” “forestry industries,” and a “forestry economy.

” The law set the stage for a boom for the forestry industry. All over the country, the transformation was dramatic. Today, Uruguay has more plantation forest cover than native forest cover, and the country's wood pulp industry employs thousands of people.

Wood pulp has become Uruguay's second-biggest export, totaling over $2 billion in 2023, and it's on the verge of becoming the biggest. Uruguay created an industry that has radically reshaped the country's landscape, but also its economy. We had a basic understanding of why the forests were there.

So we met up with a videographer and drone operator who would help us document the journey, and we set off to find the fingerprint. We're just about an hour north of Montevideo right now, and you can already start to see all of these plantations dotting the horizon. We are on our way to try to find that fingerprint.

Yeah, I mean, at this point, we don't know what it's going to look like, if it's going to look anything like the satellite image. I mean, these trees could have been cut. They could have grown in a way that the pattern is kind of hard to recognize now.

. . Anything could have changed.

I really want to see the shapes from above. Yeah. I've never been this excited to see some trees in my life.

We must be getting close, right? Yeah. We are here.

Cool. We made it. I mean, I know it's not natural, but it seems somehow natural.

It's great. You want to see it? I do.

I do. Wow. Crazy.

It's like the perfect match. There it was. A perfect fingerprint shape, exactly like we'd seen on the Internet.

Made up of thousands of trees. And surrounded by forest after forest in the same kind of design. But there was a problem.

We wanted to go inside. And every forest we’d passed was completely inaccessible. There's a lot of fences, so think it'll be hard to get inside.

It was frustrating. We didn't want to trespass. And after traveling all this way, it wasn't clear if we'd be able to see much more than this.

But then down the road, we saw a sign on one of those fences. INIA. The country's National Institute for Agricultural Research.

We sent them an email asking if they could get us inside. But as we drove around the area, something else caught our eye. Wood trucks.

They were everywhere. There's another one. There's another one.

There's another one. Hundreds of trucks full of logs going one direction, empty trucks going the other direction. As the sun set, we decided to follow them.

We're going to try to follow the trucks that are full of trees to see where they're going. After driving in the dark for an hour and a half, we saw where they were going. We’d arrived in Paso de los Toros.

It's the home of one of the biggest wood pulp mills in the world, owned by a company called UPM. They had written that first article I saw about Uruguay's “forestry miracle. ” The construction of this mill was major national news.

UPM’s facility here is massive. Its size rivals that of the city of Paso de los Toros itself, a small town of 13,000 people. Fernando also told us about a really specific change that had occurred in the town.

Little Helsinki. It's a neighborhood in Paso de los Toros where high-level UPM employees live. We drove over to see it.

Just a few blocks from a town that mostly looked like this, were these long rows of identical homes, straight out of an architectural design magazine. It's physical evidence of the ties this community has to somewhere else, somewhere very far away. Because UPM isn't from Uruguay, or from South America, but from Finland.

UPM, a Finnish company, is one of the largest landowners in Uruguay, owning almost 30% of Uruguay's 1. 1 million hectares of forest plantations. The construction of this pulp mill was the single largest investment in the history of UPM, and the single largest foreign investment in the history of Uruguay: Over $3 billion.

Standing outside the mill, we could see full trucks driving in, empty trucks driving out. But we later learned that that's not all that's happening here. Because these trucks are driving out of land subject to Uruguay's normal tax laws, and into a “tax-free zone” that the Uruguayan government set up just for this pulp mill.

It's not just company property, it's an economic space the government created to stimulate forestry production. UPM is just one of several companies involved in forestry production here, but it runs two of the country's three mills for processing eucalyptus into pulp. Together, these mills turn 17 million tons of wood into 4.

8 million tons of pulp every year, each within their own “free trade zone. ” We reached out to UPM, hoping to talk to someone from the company while we were in Paso de los Toros. But after a short back and forth, they stopped responding to our emails.

Then, INIA got back to us. They were able to get us inside a forest. Not the fingerprint forest, but a similar plantation they use for research purposes.

We hoped the visit could help us learn more about why they look that way. We met the guide from INIA, Federico, and suited up: vests for visibility, shin guards to protect against snakes, and helmets in case of falling debris. I have a really big head, so this might be hard.

Then we headed inside. It's colder here. Yeah.

You definitely notice the temperature change. Finally, we were inside one of these forests. We'd seen them from above, and now we were seeing one up close.

Seeing, touching, smelling the habitat we’d traveled all this way to experience. These eucalyptus trees are not native to Uruguay. They're from Australia.

But they grow really, really, really fast, which means that they can be planted and harvested all within about ten years. Which, you know, sounds like a long time, but for a tree that's fast. I just realized, there has to be so much planted, because if trees grow in ten years, and we see all those trucks full of trees, there has to be so much.

But being there still didn't explain the shapes of these forests. So we sat down with Gonzalo Martinez Crosa, from INIA's forestry program, and asked him. I'm curious if you can kind of describe why plantations look the way they do, why they are arranged in the shapes that they are, and the thinking that goes into it.

So when you plant big plants like trees, you need to take into consideration the topography of the soil. So, usually these lines overall follow the topography. So that's why sometimes they come up with these curious patterns of growing in curves, or spirals, or things like that.

Contour lines. These forests followed the curvature of the ground beneath them. Each concentric line in the fingerprint traced a slightly higher and higher level of elevation, until the incline came to a peak, right here.

These forests were topographic maps, drawn with trees. And sometimes, yeah, the patterns that you get are very, very curious and very interesting to see from above. So that was it.

Contour lines. Mystery solved. Our job here was done.

But I couldn't get this one thing out of my head. Something our guide had said. Nothing else grows here.

You could tell. One of the first things I noticed is just how dead the ground is. Like it's all eucalyptus.

All the dead leaves and branches. There was nothing on the forest floor but dead leaves and fungi. No sounds except for machinery in the distance.

These are monoculture tree farms, like those grown for palm oil or rubber. Not natural ecosystems. If vast areas of natural grasslands had been turned into tree farms where nothing else could grow, this “forestry miracle” seemed more complicated than I'd expected.

I think we've all heard of deforestation. We know what that looks like. We know why it's bad.

But the opposite of that, afforestation, planting a whole bunch of trees all at once. That sounds like a good thing. If deforestation is a bad thing, afforestation sounds like a good thing.

I want to figure out if that's the right assumption about this. I found Alexandra Cravino, a biologist who uses camera traps to study how afforestation changes animal populations. Compared to grasslands, her camera traps observed fewer kinds of species in firebreaks (those are the preserved areas of grassland in between the new forests) and even fewer in the eucalyptus plantations themselves.

Companies like UPM say that they keep large portions of their land uncultivated, reserved for the natural ecosystems that were there before. And UPM says it's had a system for detecting and protecting local species on its land since the early 1990s. But more and more, we were seeing that there was another side to this whole thing.

Afforestation turned real grasslands into artificial forests and that had consequences. Studies have found that afforested plantations reduce annual water yield, and can make soil less fertile and more acidic. And while these trees absorb a lot of carbon while they're alive, because they're converted into single-use paper products, much of that carbon is eventually re-released into the atmosphere when the paper eventually decomposes or is burned.

It made us wonder what harvesting looked like. So we followed an empty truck to see where it led. It was shocking.

Hectares of bare land, stacks of logs awaiting transportation. It was a part of the process we hadn't seen yet: where, after a decade of growth, the trees are cut down, taken by truck to a mill, like UPM’s, and turned into pulp. And now we were curious what happened next.

All of that pulp has to go somewhere. And Uruguay, working with outside investors, built a huge amount of infrastructure to transport and export pulp from the new UPM plant. Starting with a new billion-dollar “central railway,” from the mill to the port, that was right about to be completed.

We started to follow it south. We're driving right behind a truck full of wood pulp, which is all the stuff that, once this railroad right here alongside us is complete, will be transported in trains instead of in trucks. The railroad led us all the way back through Montevideo, past a new $130 million viaduct for improved access to the sea, and to a $280 million port terminal just for loading truckloads of wood pulp onto ships, most of which goes to Europe and China.

Construction work for this infrastructure was everywhere, a lot of it covered in graffiti with messages like “UPM get out. ” Because on its way to the port facility, the railroad cuts through neighborhoods, causing disruptions that have angered nearby residents. We're on our way right now to the neighborhood of Capurro, which is one of the places that this new train is going to go directly through.

We were able to talk to one of those families whose home was destroyed to make way for the train. In August 2018, Nancy and Rodolfo received this letter from Uruguay's Ministry of Transport, saying that it was necessary to expropriate their property. But according to Nancy and Rodolfo, they're still waiting for financial compensation.

This family's story isn't unique in Montevideo. And Uruguay’s story isn't unique in the world. Other transnational wood pulp corporations have planted eucalyptus all over the world: in Indonesia, Mozambique, Brazil.

. . These forests look similar, but exist in ecosystems whose only trait in common is that they're in countries where land is fertile, production is cheap, and wages are low compared to the Global North.

After a week in Uruguay, it was time for me to go. And going through customs at the Montevideo airport, I had to scan my fingerprint. And as we took off, I could see out of the plane window these forests I was leaving behind.

This journey had taken us down a rabbit hole: from trying to understand one strange-looking forest, to trying to understand an industry that had reshaped an entire country. These forests only exist because of the demands of the global economy. Uruguay doesn't need all of these forests, but the world, for every kind of paper, cardboard, and tissue product, does.

While we were up north filming lumber trucks, I stopped on the side of the road to watch some leafcutter ants. They were all going one way empty-handed, and the other way carrying leaves. They take the leaf cuttings back to their nest, built around a fungus.

The ants feed the fungus leaves, and the fungus in return provides food for the ant larvae. These trees, and trucks, and mills, and trains, they're all feeding. .

. something. Something that reshapes landscapes, and lives, on its way to becoming something that we interact with, every day.