Impacts could have profound implications on atmospheric carbon and climate

The Anaktuvuk River Fire is the dark shape in the right-center of this NASA-MODIS image of the North Slope of Alaska, acquired June 14, 2008. The burned area is bordered by the Nanushuk River on the west and the Itkillik River on the east. Credit: Courtesy of Jim Laundre, MBL

In a study published in Nature, Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) senior scientist Gauis Shaver and his colleagues, including lead author Michelle Mack of the University of Florida, describe the dramatic impacts of a massive Arctic wildfire on carbon releases to the atmosphere. The 2007 blaze on the North Slope of the Alaska’s Brooks Mountain Range released 20 times more carbon to the atmosphere than what is annually lost from undisturbed tundra.

As wildfires increase in frequency and size along Alaska’s North Slope, the team contends the disturbances may release large amounts of the greenhouse gas CO₂ to the atmosphere and accelerate the transformation of the frozen, treeless tundra of today into a different kind of ecosystem less capable of storing carbon. Together, the impacts could have profound implications on atmospheric carbon and climate.

Arctic tundra landscapes store huge amounts of carbon in cool, wet soils that are insulated by a layer of permanently frozen ground, or permafrost. Fire has been almost nonexistent in Alaska’s North Slope for thousands of years and the effect of fires on the carbon balance of tundra ecosystems is largely unknown. However, with warming temperatures over the past half-century, the climate in the region is in transition, spurring more thunderstorms, lightning, and wildfires.

In 2007 the Anaktuvuk River fire ravaged a 40-by-10 mile swath of tundra about 24 miles north of Toolik Field Station, where Shaver is the principal investigator of the NSF’s Arctic Long-Term Ecological Research project. The blaze was the largest ever recorded in the region.

While the Anaktuvuk River fire scorched only upper soil layers that are about 50 years old, it caused the release of more than two million metric tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere. This amount is similar in magnitude to the annual carbon sink for the entire Arctic tundra biome averaged over the last quarter of the twentieth century. According to Shaver and his colleagues, an Arctic regularly disturbed by fire could mean massive releases of CO₂ into the atmosphere, a decrease in carbon stocks on land, and a rapid impact on climate.

Shaver has been studying the Arctic tundra since the mid-1970s, and he knows how to look for gradual shifts in a landscape that is changing, but very slowly. Large disturbances such as fire—which leave the land open to rapid re-growth—have been rare. As the tundra rebounds from the Anaktuvuk River fire, Shaver and his colleagues are watching closely to see if the fire will nudge a major transformation of the North Slope groundcover that is already slowly underway.

MBL Ecosystems Center scientist Chris Neill inspects burned tussocks at the Anaktuvuk River fire site, July 2008. Credit: Jason Orfanon, MBL Logan Science Journalism Program

More shrubs are expected to appear in the Arctic landscape as the climate warms, a trend that may be accelerated by the advent of fires. “Satellites tell us there has clearly been a greening of the Arctic over the past 30 years,” Shaver says. Many observations point to a warmer landscape that will be dominated by shrubs, rather than the grasses and mosses of today. Some scientists forecast that large parts of the Arctic tundra will eventually become forest. “A key question is whether the conditions on these burn sites are more favorable for the establishment of new seeds, new species,” Shaver says.

Moreover, the burn, because it is darker, absorbs more solar radiation than undisturbed land. “You have much higher rates of permafrost thawing, and depth of thaw, on the burn,” Shaver says. All of these immediate consequences of the Anaktuvuk River fire reinforce the effects of a warming climate on the Arctic tundra. And the scientists don’t yet know if the land can recover the carbon and energy balance of its pre-burn state, or if they are looking at a “new normal,” Shaver says.

This research was supported by the NSF Division of Environmental Biology, the Division of Biological Infrastructure, and Office of Polar Programs, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and the Bureau of Land Management Alaska Fire Service and Arctic Field Office.

Source: Marine Biological Laboratory

Comments (0) Aug 06 2011

At Toolik Field Station

Ever wrestled a bear? Started a fire with two sticks?

Learn how to avoid these situations by attending an Arctic Field Training (AFT) course at Toolik Field Station sponsored by CH2M HILL Polar Services (CPS). We offer two course levels this summer, so come learn new skills or freshen up on your old ones.

Two-hour courses cover the following topics:

• Bear safety
• Threats to life
• Hypothermia and heat exhaustion
• Dressing for the field
• Staying found

Full day courses cover the following topics:

• All topics covered in the two-hour session (see above) and:
• What’s in a survival bag
• Water treatment
• Starting a fire
• Helicopter safety
• Making better decisions

Two-hour course schedule:

• Monday, June 20 7:30 to 9:30 pm
• Tuesday, June 21 1 to 3 pm
• Monday, July 11 7:30 to 9:30 pm
• Tuesday, July 12 1 to 3 pm
• Wednesday, August 3 1 to 3 pm
• Wednesday, August 3 7:30 to 9:30 pm

Full day course schedule (With 1-hour lunch break):

• Monday, June 20 8 am to 5 pm
• Tuesday, August 2 8 am to 5 pm

Interested? At Toolik Field Station, contact the Helo Coordinator; or email karla at  polarfield.com for more information.

Comments (0) Jun 08 2011

by Christie Haupert

CPS staff and scientists help load an Era helicopter A-Star. In the background, the Brooks Range. All photos Christie Haupert unless otherwise noted.

Greetings from Spring-delayed Toolik. A new summer season is nearly upon the remote field station tucked 350 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska, just out of reach of the Brooks Mountain Range.

Here at Toolik Field Station, winter lingers. But change is in the air – both in seasonality and to the field station.

The rivers have yet to flow, but break-up is eminent. Researchers are on hold, staged to capture the moment when the rivers break open and release their power. They have discharge instruments, empty water bottles and insulated waders ready to go. Hurry up and wait is the name of the game around these parts.

While the slush piles melt, drying puddles freeze and thaw, and fog rolls through the camp, the new dining/kitchen/station office, open for its first summer season, fills each feeding hour with hungry souls, piling their plates with salad, juicy grilled salmon, fresh baked bread and warm cookies from the industrial-sized ovens.

The Toolik dining facility, built in 2010. For more on the construction of the building, click on the picture.

The four-season structure is shiny and new; not even the old clock has been hung on the wall. It gives Toolik a different feel from the days of old – some say a welcomed upgrade, others say a sign of more “institutionalized” and “regulated” ways to come. The old dining hall is now the new community center, the old community center, the new meeting trailer and the old meeting trailer has yet to be named. But to reconnect with the Toolik the old timers have come to know and love, all one needs to do is wander down to one of the lab buildings, spend a few hours socializing in a dingy ACTO trailer room, or have a sweat in the sauna.

Helicopter operations started up this week, when two Eurocopter A-Stars arrived for the summer. A few days ago, after a day of fog, members of Linda Deegan’s NSF-funded biology project prepared a sling load for Green Cabin Lake. There, at the headwaters of the Kupuruk River, Linda Deegan’s team will begin a down-water migration study of Arctic grayling fish. Their gear was slung and researchers spent the day at the lake and at the Oksrukuyik River. Later this week, a team will be left at Green Cabin Lake to camp at the field site for three weeks documenting spring thaw.

The Deegan team prepares a sling load (the green object at left) while the helicopter readies for flight. The shiny truck center-left carries aviation fuel.

The helicopter departs Toolik, the sling load towed below.

Meanwhile, other changes coming to Toolik Field Station include renewable energy. CPS’ Tracy Dahl and Joe Yarkin erected a 45-foot anemometer to measure wind speed that will be used to determine effectiveness of wind power at Toolik. Read Tracy’s recent report on his Toolik based activities here.

An A-Star flies off, with the new wind-measuring anemometer instrument shown in the foreground.

Tracy Dahl and Joe Yarkin also installed micro-wind generators (the black-topped pole at right of the person in this shot) at an existing solar photovoltaic-powered research project called International Tundra Experiment or 'ITEX' (Steve Oberbauer, PI), near Toolik Field Station. The Brooks Range and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge lie in the background. Photo: Tracy Dahl

From what was once a small tent camp, to now a year-round research station with lab space, onsite general use laboratory equipment, multiple helicopters, and a 24-hour salad bar, Toolik is a testament to change. With these changes come new routines, new faces, and in the world of science, chances for new discoveries and just possibly a better understanding of the world in which we live.

[Before joining Polar Field Services and CPS as a science project manager, Fairbanks-based Christie Haupert worked at Toolik Field Station as both a researcher and staff-member for five summer seasons and three winters.

Comments (0) May 22 2011

By Tracy Dahl

Last week I left Fairbanks with “Solar” Joe Yarkin for a three-week sojourn in Alaska to work on various alternative / renewable energy projects funded by The National Science Foundation (NSF). Joe and I drove up to Toolik Field Station, bumping along the Dalton Highway under blue skies. Early Boy Scout training reinforced by a couple of decades of field experience has taught me the value of the motto, “always be prepared.” So we left Fairbanks with a truck bed full of carefully ordered and packed supplies, assembled to meet any MacGyver challenge Alaska can throw at us.

Winter had not been kind to the paved sections of this legendary road, resulting in serious frost heaves in places. Some sections are really great, others not so much. On such a long drive, it’s easy to let the good sections lull you into complacency and let the speeds start creeping upwards. Then you hit a big frost heave and all of the carefully packed supplies in the back are launched into the ceiling. Slow and steady wins the race. After a scenic and kidney-jarring nine-hour drive, we arrived at the field station, our supplies now helter-skelter and covered with road dust, but otherwise unscathed.

The Dalton Highway links Fairbanks to Toolik Field Station. "Built during construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline in the 1970s, this mostly gravel highway travels through rolling, forested hills, across the Yukon River and Arctic Circle, through the rugged Brooks Range, and over the North Slope to the Arctic Ocean. Along most of its length, you'll see no restaurants, no gift shops, no service stations—just forest, tundra, and mountains, crossed by a double ribbon of road and pipe."--from the Bureau of Land Management website. Click the photo to visit the site.

Running principally east to west, the Brooks Range is one of the great dividing mountain ranges of the world; trees on one side, tundra on the other. The contrast is truly amazing. Once over Atigun Pass (made famous in the popular anti-reality show “Ice Road Truckers”), we found we had left spring behind on the south side of the pass. The northern terrain was still impressively snow-covered.

We established our home base for the next two weeks at Toolik Field Station. In the a.m., we headed for Imnavait Creek, about 10 miles up the road from the station. On the tasking list: check the condition of power/communications systems we installed and maintain for National Science Foundation-funded research such as Steve Oberbauer’s International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) project.

In addition to maintenance, Joe and I also are erecting two experimental micro-wind generators. These little 50Watt machines are tentatively rated to operate at -70C, far lower than any other wind turbine available. This test is to see if what is written on paper can survive the real world rigors of a North Slope winter. We will route the power to one of Oberbauer’s ITEX systems, as well as to the SRI-developed “Communications Node” which is a hybrid power and communications system using a methanol fuel cell, augmented by solar and now wind power to stretch the small fuel supply.  If these tiny wind turbines perform even close to as advertised, they could prove to be a useful component for research projects with modest power requirements that need to collect data through harsh polar winters.

We also will install a new, scientific-grade, polar-rated anemometer (wind-measuring instrument) on a 45’ tower at Toolik Field Station. We want to determine if the wind resource is sufficient to warrant integrating wind power into the station electrical grid; however, the data collected will be archived and publicly accessible, and should be a valuable resource to the research community as well.

The unseasonably deep snow cover—up to three feet in places—was a boon and a bane. While it made finding the anchor locations for the anemometer tower meticulously marked out last summer difficult, we were suitably equipped to handle it (see picture). The snow cover also allowed us to use snowmobiles to access the sites for all of the autonomous power systems, rather than having to snowshoe the miles between them. This approach enabled us to bring in all of the required tools and replacement components in one fell swoop. Nice timesaver, that.

The snow was a bit deeper than expected, making finding the surveyed anchor points challenging.

Fortunately, we came prepared. Dig. Jackhammer. Dig.

Back at Toolik on the anemometer project, cold ground temperatures and the heavy snow cover made concrete work challenging, but again, we had come prepared. We used an electric jackhammer to chip out the frozen ground for the anchor holes. Fortifying the concrete mix with extra Portland cement results in a very strong mix, but also leads to a very hot reaction and a fast cure time – almost too fast if you aren’t ready to set the steel straight away. This was some heavy work, and by afternoon the sun had softened the snow to the point where carrying an 80-pound jackhammer from one spot to another became an exercise in post-holing frustration. Still, by day’s end we had checked off each item on our tasking list.

When we finish at Toolik this week, Joe will head home to tend his small farming operation on Vashon Island, Washington,  and I will move on to Barrow and the small village of Atqasuk, where I will install the second two of four power and communications systems for the ITEX project. So far so good—but it’s not mosquito season yet.

Note: For more on alternative and renewable energy uses in the polar regions, visit www.polarpower.org.

Comments (0) May 17 2011

So much counter space! The new kitchen at Toolik can feed up to 150 people and can operate year-round. All images courtesy Stan Wisneski

At the beginning of October, CH2M HILL Polar Services (CPS) celebrated the completion of an energy-efficient, spacious, new 6,200-square-foot facility at the Toolik Field Station, the University of Alaska’s research station on the North Slope of Alaska’s Brooks Range. The new building houses a kitchen that can feed up to 150 people, two dining areas, bathrooms, and camp staff offices, and it was designed and constructed to meet LEED certification, said Polar Field Service’s lead on the project, Stan Wisneski.

(Click here for the Toolik kitchen floor plan).

The building is extremely well-insulated and incorporates smart, eco-friendly features, such as ventilation hoods that are self-activated and automatically switch off when they are no longer needed.

The high-end kitchen features multiple sinks, excellent ventilation, a designated scullery, and industrial, energy efficient dishwashers.

Funded By Stimulus Money

Designed in the winter of 2009, the $5 million building went out to bid in June that year, as was required by the National Science Foundation to comply with the rules of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), widely known as the “stimulus package.” Johnson River Enterprises, a family-owned Fairbanks-based company, was awarded the bid. The company began construction in spring 2010 and completed the work by the end of September.

“They did a fantastic job,” said Wisneski. “They were so good to work with, it was a dream company. We had a very ambitious timeline, and they met us every step of the way.”

Awaiting Final Approval

All that remains now that construction is complete is for the NSF to award final acceptance.

This new building enables Toolik to better function year-round and support a winter population of up to 50 people, said Wisneski. Since the winter of 2006-2007, people have lived year-round at Toolik, but their facilities were small and the kitchen was more like one you would find in a home. Although it was sufficient, it wasn’t ideal.

This work island provides one of many counters in the new kitchen.

“The small kitchen has fed as many as 25 people at one time,” said Wisneski. “It was only for a week, but that was a long week.”

Additional Work Space

When not being used as a dining room, this room can double as a work space.

In addition to the expansive kitchen, the new facility provides additional space and a climate-controlled environment for the camp’s fiber optic cable, which was relocated to the building during construction. During the winter, one of the dining areas will remain empty, so scientists and camp staff can utilize the empty space as they need to.

The Toolik Field Station is located in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range in Alaska. Toolik-based researchers have access to 87,000 acres designated by the Bureau of Land Management as a Research Natural Area. The station has been a major location for scientific research in the Arctic since 1975.  —Rachel Walker

Comments (0) Oct 18 2010

Josh Dugat shows off the Schwarz flag at Portage Glacier near Anchorage. All photos courtesy Josh Dugat

“I’ve lived in the South my whole life. PolarTREC exposed me to a world I never would have known otherwise. I want my students to know that their teacher is a dynamic person who gets excited about discovery. Hopefully, this will motivate them to take advantage of opportunities in their own lives. Even students and staff at Schwarz can be recognized and get to do something extreme.” — Josh Dugat

Inner City School

 Josh Dugat is the only science teacher at Schwarz Academy, one of two alternative schools for the Recovery School District in New Orleans. Schwarz serves students who have been expelled from other schools or who have been found guilty of Class III infractions, or incarcerated for drugs, violence, and other offenses. Dugat’s inner-city classroom can be a revolving door as students come and go throughout the school year.

Into The Wild

It’s a long way from his sweltering classroom to the Arctic, but this year Dugat participated in the PolarTREC program as part of a team working on the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) network.

Established in 1991, CALM includes researchers from fifteen countries and 175 sites across the Arctic, Antarctica, and several alpine locations where scientists study permafrost.

Arctic Exploration

Dugat’s summer adventure took him about as far from the Gulf Coast as a person can get: First stop, Anchorage, where Dugat, along with Elliot Upin and Kelsey Nyland, attended the North Slope Training Cooperative “Unescorted North Slope” Safety Orientation.

Training

Required of anyone headed to the northern Alaskan oil fields, the daylong training covered accident prevention, emergency response, the dangers of hydrogen sulfide, as well as what to do upon meeting polar bears or other arctic wildlife.

The next day, after a few more training videos at the British Petroleum building downtown, Dugat spent a rainy day with other members of the research team visiting the Anchorage Museum, Independence Gold mine, Eklutna Historical Park and finally, eating a dinner of reindeer sausage at George Washington University graduate student, Ellen Hatleberg’s house. The next day they visited the Portage Glacier and the Alaska Native Heritage Center.

Into the Field

Kelsey Nyland, Josh Dugat, Cathy Sebold, Anna Klene and Elliott Upin cross the Arctic Circle on the Dalton highway.

From Anchorage, Dugat, Upin and Nyland, along with GW Post-Doc Dmitriy Streletskiy drove to Fairbanks, picked up a few more of the project’s scientists—Anna Klene (University of Montana) and Cathy Seybold (USDA)—and headed up the 400-mile Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay.

Along the way, the team stopped at two soil monitoring sites to record soil and air temperature, moisture content, precipitation levels, and solar radiation levels. The focus of these sites is to observe conditions affecting the active layer, the upper layer of soil that exists above permafrost and freezes and thaws with the seasons.

Probing the Permafrost (Tour de Alaska)

Duct tape to the rescue! Josh Dugat and Kelsey Nyland repair a damaged data logger tripod.

That was only the beginning of Dugat’s relationship with permafrost. At CALM sites in and around Prudhoe Bay, he became an “active layer prober,” taking two measurements of the active layer depth every 100 meters on 1 square km grids, totaling 242 measurements per grid! In the video below, Dugat explains how it all works:

Permafrost on YouTube

Between stints in Prudhoe Bay, the team checked in at Toolik Field Station. From there they took helicopter shuttles to access remote ‘flux’ sites, where soil and air temperatures are continuously recorded. Dugat spent most of his time repairing tripods and data loggers damaged by interested animals.

Final stop: Barrow. From the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC), Dugat and the team took a final round of thaw depth measurements on grids established in the 1960s. They also measured the tundra surface with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) instruments, which use reflected laser light to produce very detailed images.

A Teacher’s Perspective

During the next couple of days in Barrow, Dugat toured the science lab at Barrow High School, and visited the Inupiat Heritage Center. Among his other unusual stops, he also gathered data from a temperature monitor scientists maintain in a permafrost meat cellar.

BASC station manager, Lewis Brower, explained to Dugat the life of a whaling captain (allowing him to taste muktuk – whale blubber and skin). In his last day in town, Dugat caught the end of the Barrow Whalers football game against the Valdez Buccaneers and went for a “Polar Bear” swim in the Arctic Ocean.

Home Again

Now, back in his New Orleans classroom, Dugat is charged with sharing his experiences with his students. He says he wants to inspire them to investigate the unexpected parallels between tundra and bayou.

Climate Change and Katrina

“There’s definitely a climate-change connection, particularly for students who experienced Katrina. Engineering problems associated with land subsidence here in Southeastern Louisiana relate to building concerns for those designing structures on permafrost,” explains Dugat. “Albeit for different reasons, land in both regions exhibits subsidence.”

Dugat also mentions the industrial similarities between the North Slope and Gulf Coast. BP is the primary operator for North Slope oil wells, and has a particular presence in the New Orleans area, given the events surrounding last spring’s Deepwater Horizon Spill.

Portrait of a Teaching Career

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the New Orleans public school system in 2005, many doors were opened for education reform in the city. Dugat came to New Orleans in 2009 as one of many Teach for America teachers. Once Dugat completed the Teach for America certification program, which trains K-12 teachers and places them in high-need areas, Dugat became passionate about student achievement in the Crescent City.

Teaching at an alternative school has its own unique brand of challenges. Dugat doesn’t always know how long a student will remain in his class or when another will show up. Consequently, engaging his 9^th-12^th grade students in complex topics like climate change can be difficult. Exposure, Dugat says, is key. Parlaying his experience into a teachable moment helps the students contextualize the information.

“It is doubtful they would ever hear about it (Arctic climate change),” explains Dugat. “It’s debatable whether permafrost directly influences their daily lives, but if students are made aware of its presence, then they are made aware of the world between here and the Arctic, and that everything in between is connected. It’s important for them to read about and hear about things they and the people they know have never done before.”—Marcy Davis

Comments (0) Sep 20 2010

On the banks of Dimple Lake, a shelter awaits use by researchers working at the site of a massive tundra fire. Photo: Annalisa Neely

Per the above note, it sounds as if the shelter fit the bill. In fact, the “maiden voyage of the SS Mountain Hardware” sounds downright festive.

The Anaktuvuk River fire of 2007 created a field research opportunity for scientists looking at the environmental impacts of climate change. Read Emily Stone’s article on the NSF-funded work going on at the Anaktuvuk burn site here. –Kip Rithner

Comments (0) Aug 29 2010

William (Breck) Bowden of the University of Vermont leads MBL Science Journalism fellows to the site of a newly emerging tundra thaw slump, or themokarst, near the Toolik Field Station. Bowden heads a large new project funded by NSF that will quantify the number of thermokarsts and their ecological effects. Photos: Chris Neill

A group of 10 international science journalists learned about cutting edge climate research during a hands-on fellowship in June at Toolik Field Station.

The Marine Biological Laboratory’s program combines lectures from scientists and visits to work sites in the field with a crash-course in how to conduct climate change research — everything from measuring carbon dioxide uptake by plants to calculating the flow rate of a river, and then crunching and analyzing that data.

The goal is for journalists to leave with a better understanding of Arctic climate science and what it takes to do the research itself. And scientists get to chat with journalists in a relaxed atmosphere, which will hopefully make them feel more comfortable the next time they’re interviewed. The journalists also get a taste of what life is like for scientists working at a field camp: sleeping in tents, eating surprisingly tasty food and making due with a conspicuous absence of flush toilets. Word is that this year’s fellows escaped the dreaded omnipresent giant North Slope mosquitoes due to a dry start of summer and little standing water on the tundra.

MBL Science Journalism fellows haul a plexiglass chamber over boardwalks near Toolik Field Station to measure how the movement of carbon dioxide into and out of tussock tundra responds to warming and the increased abundance of Arctic shrubs.

Christopher Neill, a senior scientist at MBL and the director of the fellowship, wrote in an email from Toolik that he highlighted projects this year that examine changing seasonality in the Arctic. Warmer temperatures earlier in the year have created changes in plant growth, river flow and animal activity. The journalists looked at a project studying how changes in the timing of water flow and insect emergence in the Kuparuk River are impacting grayling fish, as well as a study of the timing of bird reproduction.

MBL Science Journalism fellows Victoria Barber (l) and Susan Moran collect invertebrates in the Kuparuk River to determine how the foodwebs of arctic rivers may to respond to small increases in the supply of nutrients likely to be released by warmer temperatures and thawing of tundra.

The group also got to visit and learn about the site of a massive 2007 fire along the Anaktuvuk River. The burn has caused numerous thermokarst failures — the slumping of ground when the permafrost underneath melts.

“We took a great trip to a thermokarst in the Anaktuvuk River Fire area,” fellow Benjamin Shaw, a producer with National Geographic Weekend, wrote in an email from camp. “It is still sloughing into Horn Lake and it was a very visible example of thawing permafrost. … I cover global warming on a regular basis, but I wanted to head into the field to look at specific changes happening on a local level in a part of the world where climate change seems to be having a great impact.”

The journalists visited Toolik from June 18 to July 1. Neill says there’s funding to continue to send journalists there, but probably not the full 10-person complement of the past three years (when a National Science Foundation outreach and education grant bolstered the program).

Many of this year’s fellows have been blogging about the scientific research at Toolik as well as their adventures there.

Vienna-based freelancer Chelsea Wald posted a story on Scientific American’s Web site about her visit to a thermokarst study site: “I was nearly eaten by a thermokarst. I just stepped in and, before I knew it, I was sucked in up to the top of my big rubber boot.”

And Gretchen Weber, associate producer for Climate Watch with KQED Public Broadcasting in San Francisco, described the drive from Fairbanks to Toolik this way: “Between the frost heaves caused by the alternate freezing and thawing of the ground, and those Ice Road Trucker tires chewing up the road, driving the Haul Road is more like an amusement park ride, at least from the back seat of a 15-person van.” –Emily Stone

Emily Stone is a Chicago-based freelance writer and was a 2009 MBL Science Journalism Fellow at Toolik.

For more stories from the MBL science journalism fellowship, visit the blog, A Toolik Field Journal.

Comments (0) Aug 09 2010

The weather at Toolik in July this year has been dramatic at times.

Photos: Richard Perales

Comments (0) Jul 28 2010

A patch of purplish-blue Arctic lupine. All photos: Anja Kade

Thick green grasses, hearty shrubs, white wispy cotton grass, and patches of purple, pink, blue and yellow flowers all turning their petals toward the sun—this is the Alaskan tundra that greets scientists and visitors to the Toolik Field Station during the summer field season.  While winters are bleak and stark white, the summer conditions on the tundra bring a welcome, and colorful, change in scenery.

After months of wind, snowstorms and freezing temperatures, the area surrounding the Toolik Field Station, situated in the northern foothills of Alaska’s Brooks Range, is dotted with colorful plant life. Plants like the bright yellow Arctic poppy and the brilliant purplish-blue Arctic lupine are putting on a short-lived display.

Beginning in June, the rising temperatures coupled with near 24-hour sunlight start to thaw the very top layer of the permafrost, known as the active layer.  (Permafrost is soil that has been frozen for two or more years.)

Anja Kade, a scientist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology and instructor at the field station, points out that soils in permafrost-affected areas are often quite nutrient-poor and waterlogged. As the top few inches of the soil thaw, the portions underneath remain frozen allowing little or no drainage. The result is a very soggy top layer of permafrost soil.  “We usually need boots to walk around out there,” Kade said.

The region’s hearty plants have evolved to thrive in these conditions. Two types of tundra are typically found around the Toolik Field Station: the very moist and spongy tussock tundra and the much drier heath tundra. Each supports different plant life.

Two types of tundra are common near the Toolik Field Station, the spongy tussock tundra . . .

. . . and the drier heath tundra.

A stroll through tussock tundra reveals thick clumps of white Arctic cotton grass, green mosses, lichens and vascular plants. This type of tundra is often called “ankle breaking tundra” due to the thick tussocks (or clumps of cotton grass) that make the ground underneath feel very spongy, Kade explained. There are also many blooming plants like the Arctic lupine, the yellow and white Arctic dryad and various species of lousewort that produce blooms ranging in color from yellow to pink.

Heath tundra is another common tundra type near Toolik. Kade described it as much drier and less vegetated than tussock tundra. “Dry heath tundra usually supports more lichens along with the typical heath species such as cranberry and blueberry,” she said.

The wooly lousewort puts on quite the display with its pink petals. The plant insulates itself by producing white, hair-like structures.

Many of the plants at such high latitudes are much smaller than those found in a more temperate climate. For instance, rhododendrons top out at only four inches tall.

There are also several species of shrubs, including dwarf birch and willow that usually grow no more than three feet tall. “Summers are too short to allow for much wood production and there may be sun for only two months,” Kade said. In late August and early September the shrubs will begin to change color. The display of colors is much like one would expect in the northeastern regions of the United States, just on a much smaller scale.

Summer doesn’t last very long on Alaska’s tundra. As September comes to a close, though daylight lingers, the colors on the tundra surrounding the field station are mostly gone. But in a year’s time, they’ll be back.

“It is nice, after the cold days of winter, to see little bursts of color on the tundra,” Kade said. “It makes you feel happy.”

The Arctic dryad are enough to brighten anyone’s day.

For more information about the Institute of the Arctic’s Toolik Field Station and ongoing research projects there, visit http://toolik.alaska.edu/

–Alicia Clarke

Comments (0) Jul 23 2010