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