gluing feathers on each other

Here are some tundra creepies I collected yesterday. A spider, and a little gnat sort of creature. Normally boring, but flora and fauna take on all sorts of interesting when you realize their species have somehow managed to eek out a living in the arctic. Like how an ordinary person suddenly becomes a fascinating individual when you learn he was at DDay, or a journalist in Gaza.
"What? You liberated Europe from the Nazis? Well, isn't this a treat!"
"Serious? You survive most the year in freezing temperatures, regularly dropping to 30 below?! Put 'er there buddy!" Like that. Exactly like.... that.

Anyway, bugs have absolutely nothing to do with what we're doing here, but hauling sleds of equipment back and forth from ATVs has given me a lot of time to study the tundra as well as my boots. A bit about the tundra: Tundra comes from a Lappish word (Lappish?), that means "elevated wasteland." And while it is a wasteland in its conspicuous lack of  trees or bushes (other than this woody shrub that creeps along the ground), and probably looks a lot more wastelandish (more wasted?) in early spring and late autumn, I have not experienced anything I would call barren at all.

The tundra here is a thick spongy organic layer of mosses, lichens, grasses, and small shrubs. It squishes down under your feet, and springs back up behind you, and if you bend down and pull it apart, it separateness and slices it like an enormous layer of cake. In other places it is muddy and wet, and often it looks like fields of short prairie land grass, with relief caused by frost action creating frost boils and ice-wedge polygons.  Below this spongy stuff is the active layer, a layer of organic material and soil that freezes and thaws yearly, and beneath this is the permafrost, ground that is frozen year-round. One of the measurements we take at all our sites is the thaw depth with a thaw depth rod (a metal pole with a pointy end. ) It's easy to do, because the rod slides down through the soft organic layer (heh heh), and then hits this rock hard soil, ice solid, so that you would have to chip at it to go any further.

Nothing drains from here. I think I mentioned this last post, but the flat landscape with the underlayer of permafrost means that lakes and lake basins are everywhere. See the little lakes in the picture? What we are studying are these lake basins, mainly comparing carbon flux among basins of different ages. More detail in a later post, but here is the abstract for a similar study, done a few years ago by Cove's adviser and another grad student.

Any study measuring elements of an ecosystem is important, i think, but the reason these studies have received a lot of attention is the current trends in the Arctic Circle of rising temperatures and loss of sea ice.

As the globe warms, the arctic will warm more than the rest of the planet. Here is a good explanation of why this is the case. The permafrost contains a huge reservoir of carbon as as organic matter. These sinks, as they are called, of carbon in the arctic have often not been taken into account in models seeking to predict future climate change. As the arctic warms and the permafrost thaws,these massive stores of carbon may be released into the atmosphere in relatively short amounts of time. The possibility of the sudden addition of new factor into our global ecosystem should be taken seriously; carbon is especially significant as it will increase the amount of solar radiation that is trapped and absorbed as heat in our atmousphere, rather than passing back into space.

Another gas we are measuring is methane, which, as a greenhouse gas is calculated to have ~25 times greater warming effect per unit than carbon dioxide, although there is quite a bit less methane in the atmosphere. Methane has recently been quite a hot topic in the field, much because of a researcher in Siberia who lit a match and ignited a methane bubble released from the ice (as well as doing a lot of research about it too.) Read about her here, if interested.

Of all the possible consequences of a warming planet, I think people living in coastal regions in third world areas in Asia have the most to worry about soonest. The effects of a rising sea level and the accompanying intense storms due to global warming will be most inconvenient for them, as cities, towns, and shanty towns flood and are ravaged by tsunamis.

I still haven't really talked about what I've been doing here, or what life is like in Barrow... so anyway, here's me doing something somewhat dangerous: