Alaska's permafrost meltdown

 

 

The Arctic has warmed four times faster than anywhere else on the planet, and today’s newsletter takes you to Alaska for a firsthand view. There, researchers are racing to understand what’s happening to permafrost and the 1.4 trillion tons of carbon it stores. Nothing less than the fate of the climate hangs in the balance.

 

Extreme science on top of the world

By Danielle Bochove On the last day of August, as the High North summer tips to autumn, I found myself balancing on the gunnels of a 10-foot inflatable Achilles raft bouncing across whitecaps scudding the Beaufort Sea. The temperature was barely above freezing, the sun fickle.  It's a short ride but the only dry way to get me, lacking hip-waders, to a waterlogged patch of tundra beside one of Hilcorp Alaska’s massive oil pads where the team of scientists from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, I’ve embedded with will be gathering data all week. (The boat serves another purpose, which I’ll get to.) Doing climate research under the shadow of an oil rig is ironic, to say the least, but in this part of the world, there’s no other option. Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oil fields are the largest in North America. Once you travel north to Deadhorse — a "town" that exists solely to serve the vast oil production complex — it’s the end of the road unless you can get permission from one of the oil companies to access the land they lease on the edge of the Arctic Ocean for fossil fuel extraction.

The scientists take a soil sample at the edge of a Beaufort Sea lagoon. Photographer: Nathaniel Wilder   The work on this scientific project is multifaceted, but the common denominator is saltwater. As sea levels rise and storms get more violent, the ocean is washing over the tundra with increasing frequency. The team is studying knock-on effects, including the impact that inundation may be having on permafrost. The frozen layer of mineral soil, rock and undecomposed organic material stretches across millions of acres and contains roughly 1.4 trillion tons of carbon. Understanding how fast it’s thawing is key to gauging how much previously frozen carbon is being released into the atmosphere, and ultimately the state of the global carbon budget. The days were long — we were up at 6 a.m. and often couldn’t make it back to camp before the kitchen closed — but the scientists stayed deeply focused on their work. In fact, they were so intense I found myself doubting whether any of them would even notice if one of the polar bears in the area wandered by. I learned about their experiments, but I also learned that scanning the horizon for polar bears 10 hours a day strains the eyes as well as the nerves. I felt better when the project lead, Julia Guimond, told me she has polar bear dreams before every expedition — and worse when the team’s veteran, Jim McClelland, said that’s because two years ago, a polar bear pawed through their equipment while they ran and escaped in the boat. (In addition to transporting reporters, it serves as a bear escape vehicle.)  Happily, this trip was bear-free. Julia Guimond pulls a stake from a Beaufort Sea lagoon. Photographer: Nathaniel Wilder   Among the many images indelibly etched in my memory is one of Guimond plunging her shoulders beneath the frigid water of No Point Creek, feeling for the underwater equipment she installed back in July. With her orange toque and dripping bare arms, she looked like a character on some yet-to-be-created Alaska reality TV show. It might not be a bad backup plan. The state of scientific funding in the US is dire right now, with widespread cuts by the Trump administration. The stakes are particularly high for Alina Spera and Liz Elmstrom, the younger postdoctoral researchers on this trip, whose careers depend on landing funding that can act as a launchpad for their own research. “It’s not the easiest career path,” Elmstrom told me one evening, but there’s no work that makes her happier. On our last day in the field, it’s not hard to see why. The sun came out, coats came off, and with the bulk of the work done, we paused to marvel at the weather. I took my first five-minute ‘’tundra nap” and we all enjoyed a packed lunch on the beach. Noticing that his fingers are clean after being caked in grime from gathering core samples, McClelland deadpanned, “I likely ate some 1000-year-old dirt.” It’s a moment of levity before one last afternoon push. And then it’s time to pack the samples in coolers, load them on trucks and scrub the boat. The contents of those coolers are now back in Massachusetts, undergoing months of analysis. As more pieces of the permafrost carbon sink puzzle are filled in, the magnitude of the challenge the world faces will become clear. If more of this vast store of carbon starts to leak into the atmosphere, the climate will heat up to still more dangerous levels. And the permafrost is just one natural carbon sink within the vast carbon budget. Follow our series looking at the entire system in the coming months, starting with this one.