Observing the scars of the Arctic thaw

Jane Qiu has written a Q & A with Breck Bowdon, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Vermont, Burlington for Nature.

Last week marked the start of a US$5 million project to study the effects of thawing permafrost on ecosystems in the Arctic. Based at the Toolik Field Station in northern Alaska and sponsored by the US National Science Foundation, the project will look at the impact of thermokarsts — the scars and pits left behind as melt water from permanently frozen ground leaks away, and soil and rock collapses in its wake.

Read the full article here.

On the Aufeis

Lisa Jarvis summits the aufeis.

Over at The Perch, I put up a post about our trip to an aufeis—a vast ice formation with layers of white and aqua. We climbed on top, traced the tunnels that run through it now that it’s melting, and even ducked beneath it.

ANWAR Along the Atigun

Went to the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge on a hike—saw sheep, a wolf (from far away) a golden eagle (flew over my head, was nice enough not to drop a missive) and we just missed having a bunch of rocks slide on our heads. And two of us hiked a couple of kilometres past the van. Oops. Sorry to everyone waiting and wondering….

Postcards from Toolik

Over at Field Notes, the Polar Field Services Newsletter, Emily Stone writes about Linda Deegan’s research of Arctic Graylings on the Kuparuk River.

Linda Deegan, a senior scientist at MBL who studies an arctic fish called the grayling, doesn’t need to see temperature stats to know that the climate around Lake Toolik is changing. She just has to check her travel calendar.

Click here to read the full article.

Carrying oil to the lower 48

Over at greenjersey.org, Jennifer Weiss has written about the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline.

Toolik Field Station, AK – It’s like a strange, 800-mile-long piece of public art: The Alaska pipeline. A monument to the country’s LTR with oil that has carried billions of barrels of it, and still provides hundreds of thousands of barrels a day (15 percent of U.S. domestic oil production, according to operator Alyeska, though that figure may be low). Click here for the full article.