In a few specific and mysterious parts of the world, a short journey can be like traveling through time – and scientists aren't sure what's going on.

The phenomenon is called seasonal asynchrony, and a new study finds these perplexing locations appear in tropical mountains of countries like Costa Rica as well as places like California that have Mediterranean climates.

In these locations, the seasons are out of sync, with plants blooming at different times. A study published in Nature in August found that satellite images could identify regions where short distances separated locations that appeared to be in two different seasons.

While researchers found examples all over the world, they don't have a unifying explanation.

"There's this sort of complex kind of dance of rhythms happening across the landscape in somewhere like California," said study author Drew Terasaki Hart. "In the tropics, we know much less."

Tracking plants from space

Hart was spending a summer doing research in Costa Rica when he first noticed the unusual changes in vegetation.

Hart, an ecologist and data analyst with Australia's national science agency CSIRO, found that two sites he was studying had dramatically different numbers of the same plants, despite their close proximity.

Using new methods of tracking plant growth from space, he later launched into a research project that may have identified the culprit.

Hart said his research found certain environments experience the peak "greenness" of spring roughly two months earlier than forest ecosystems, what's called a "double peak."

Hart and his coauthors looked at 20 years worth of satellite images of Earth and estimated the amount of vegetation in a given area by calculating how much infrared light was bouncing off the planet's surface.

The "deceptively simple approach" allowed them to find differences in the seasonal rhythms between any two places and produce a map showing these variations across the globe. The team found that seasons peak at different times across certain regions, including five with similar climates: Chile, South Africa, southern Australia, California and the Mediterranean.

"The main pattern really seems to hit a lot of the major tropical mountains. That was what we expected. The Mediterranean regions kind of came out as a surprise, then made sense in retrospect," he said, pointing to a 2020 study that identified this pattern in California.

What's throwing off the seasons?

Hart said more work needs to be done to determine what causes vegetation to flourish in some areas sooner than others, but the primary drivers are likely differences in temperature and precipitation.

For example, he said trees in the valleys of California likely soak up all the water they can get from precipitation in the winter and then kick their life cycle into high gear well before the summer drought. But in California's mountains, trees have deeper roots so they can access groundwater and start to grow once temperatures warm up.

In the tropics, where tall trees can scrape water out of the clouds, Hart said the timing of plant growth may be closely related to the availability of light and water.

"And that is not just based on the simple sort of geometry of how the Earth orbits around the sun on an angle, but actually has to do with how air flows across these really tall, really complex landscapes like the Andes and in places like that," he said.

Could out-of-sync seasons lead to the creation of new species?

The patterns Hart and his coauthors spotted from space reflect on-the-ground observations that have been documented in some places before, he said. The National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia, for example, has produced a map showing the harvests at some sites that are less than 40 miles apart are as out of sync as if they were in different hemispheres, according to the study.

But he said the Nature study likely provides the first worldwide look at variations in the timing of seasonal activities like plant growth.

Hart said he hoped the research could help shed light on why tropical mountain regions in particular have so much biodiversity.

It's possible, Hart said, that the seasons being out of whack could cause neighboring groups of the same kind of animal to breed at different times and eventually become so genetically different that a new species is formed. But a lot more research is needed to determine if that's actually happening, he said.

"There's just a whole lot I think that can be done with this because we haven't really looked at the world this way much before," Hart said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Scientists pinpoint locations where Earth's seasons are mysteriously out-of-sync

Reporting by N'dea Yancey-Bragg, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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