The end of the world, and a beautiful sandwich

Today for lunch, you will be pleased to hear that I made a beautiful sandwich. Ingredients were hummus, cheese, and guacamole between toasts. I won't post a picture of it because I feel pictures of lunches are already well represented in the blogsphere, and also, I already ate it. Besides it tasted much better than it looked, which was like smashed bugs and cheese.

Now that we are well over halfway done with our project, I suppose I should tell you what it's all about. First of all, we are not directly studying global warming but the tundra ecosystem: what the study is actually measuring, the flux of methane and carbon dioxide gasses in tundra drained lake basins, is independent of a change in climate insofar as it is always happening, and right now we happen to be measuring it. These rates pertain to climate change in important ways, and when scientists want to know about global warming and its effects, studies like Cove's play a vital role.

Whether or not climate change is happening and what its effects might be are good questions. I referred to a website about it that i liked in an earlier post. I also liked this Naom Chomsky clip, in which he answers a question about global warming. Not that Chomsky should be taken as an expert in this area, but I think he phrases the situation well. I edited it down, but the complete clip is here. 

What we are studying specifically is carbon dioxide and methane flux on the tundra. So, we all know that human's breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, and that plants breath in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. This is simplified of course, but anyway, biomes are quite complicated versions of this. In a given ecosystem, you will have animals and plants decomposing and growing, taking carbon from the air and soil, emitting them, depositing them, and lots and lots of microbes doing the same. The tundra is a particularly interesting case because a huge amount of the arctic is frozen in the form of permafrost or ocean ice. As the globe warms, and the ground thaws, and the ice melts, and a vast amount of organic material becomes available, this biome has the potential to change its whole game very quickly, much more quickly than tropical or temperate system for instance.

The arctic is particularly sensitive to what scientists call feedback loops, in which the effects of warming in turn has its own warming effect which must also be figured into climate changing models. In the case of sea ice for example, ice reflects much more solar energy than it absorbs, whereas open water absorbs much more solar energy than it reflects. So, as the area of water increases relative to the area of ice, the total area now has a much greater capacity for absorbing heat, which will in turn make it melt faster, and so on. This process also introduces a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere above the arctic, which has its own short-term powerful warming greenhouse effect.

Tundra permafrost is a good example of a feedback system as well. Stored in the tundra is a huge amount of carbon (a "sink") in the form of frozen organic material. As it thaws, this massive sink may become an increasingly big player in the global methane and carbon budgets, as much of this suddenly usable organic material is gobbled up by skyrocketing populations of microbes. The worry is the world will suddenly have a lot more carbon and methane in the atmosphere to deal with than was originally expected, which is no small worry since the recently measured amounts of carbon and methane measured in the worldwide atmosphere have exceeded even the most generous predictions, and everyone is wondering where the hell the additional gas is coming from after the known human and natural sources are taken into account. The larger concern is the worry that the globe has already warmed to the point where feedback systems are strong enough to sustain these warming trends. This is the "tipping point" Chomsky mentioned. See: Runaway Climate Change.

Sometimes I think that the popularity of apocalyptic cinema and literature and video games, is in part thanks to an unconscious sense of the unsustainable state of the world, population, resource consumption, etc: our fear of doomsday confronted sitting in a soft butter stained theater seat. When you are leaning back during the production, think about how your head is nuzzling back into the blue cushions in the same way as all the other greasy heads of hair that have come before you. Gross, right? Hair is quite gross in most contexts actually, and I... well, never mind.

So anyway, one of the most important applications of Cove's PHD project is that is offers a good picture of what tundra cycles look like. Over this summer, and previous summers, his group has looked at as many relevant seasonal variables as possible. Carbon dioxide and methane emissions are the main focus, and require the most expensive instruments, but the data given by additional tundra measurements make its explanatory power much more far reaching. For instance, knowing an area's thaw depth, the amount of sunlight it received, the flux of heat in and out of the ground, how much water is in the soil, and the temperature of the soil, gives his data the power to offer projections of what carbon and methane flux might look like these variables change. If he notices that a given area of water saturated tundra compared to drier tundra emits such and such amount of methane, this data would allow him to look at a satellite image of tundra and hypothesize how much methane might be being emitted from a large area. Similarly, let’s say he noticed that for every increase of 10 cm in thaw depth, he saw an increase of 20% in methane CO2 emissions. All this would be very useful data for scientists trying to figure out things about how and when and how much the tundra will be a source of methane and carbon dioxide. 

The instruments we are using to measure these fluxes are also quite cool. Methane and carbon dioxide are measured by separate instruments. They are called open-path infrared gas analyzers: they beam infrared light back and forth to detect how much of a specific gas is in the path at a given time at 10 hertz, or ten times per second. This is coordinated with wind measurements taken by a sonic anemometer, which sends high frequency sound bleeps, or whatever, between its many sensors (six sensors), and measures the wind speed and direction in a three dimensional space. It has two white poles, one above and one below, with three senors each on claw-like looking appendages at the ends pointed at each other. The fluxes, the up and down flow of these gases, are then calculated from all this data with a method called eddy covariance, which remains a member of the set of all things I don't really understand very well at all. So yeah. Neat.

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