PolarisProject

Ambarchik was a Soviet prison camp (gulag) beginning in the 1930′s. This place has a sad feeling to it, perched on the edge of the world, the Arctic Ocean to one side and the treeless tundra to the other. It is now the site of a new tragedy: as the climate warms, storms strengthen, ecosystems shift, and weather patterns change. This is leading to famine, drought, and death across the world. There is hope, and it lies in our ability to change our course.

“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
- C.S. Lewis

A quay built by political prisoners.

A herd of reindeer near Ambarchik reminded us of the life that is worth fighting for.

Today is the Fab Four’s final day in Cherskiy – only one more of Valentina’s delicious lunches and we’re on our way to the airport.  Leaving is very bittersweet; while we are excited by the thought of seeing friends and family in a few short days, we are very sad to be leaving this place that we have grown to love over the past few months. But the weather today enforces the fact that it’s time for the “summer crowd” to depart – chilly temperatures and blustery wind greeted us this morning. The colors of the landscape are starting to change to the deep reds and copper golds of fall. The plane ride from Cherskiy will be beautiful; even though we’ve already seen it 3 times I’m sure our noses will be pressed against the glass the whole way, soaking up our last glimpses of the landscape.

We land in Yakutsk tonight and depart early the next day for Moscow – look for more travel updates in a few days!

In the wake of the heat wave here in Russia, as well as the several other bouts of extreme weather around the globe this year (floods in the US and Pakistan, heat waves in Africa, eastern Asia, and eastern US), it is looking more and more like we are seeing the effects of anthropogenic (man-made) climate change.

There is a nice summary article in the New York Times today: In Weather Chaos, a case for Global Warming

Due to its severity, the Russian heat wave is give some extra attention:

“If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA in New York. “If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.”

In Russia, that kind of scientific caution might once have been embraced. Russia has long played a reluctant, and sometimes obstructionist, role in global negotiations over limiting climate change, perhaps in part because it expected economic benefits from the warming of its vast Siberian hinterland.

But the extreme heat wave, and accompanying drought and wildfires, in normally cool central Russia seems to be prompting a shift in thinking.

“Everyone is talking about climate change now,” President Dmitri A. Medvedev told the Russian Security Council this month. “Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.”

Here are a few other articles on the same topic:

Climate Experts Agree: Global Warming Caused Russian Heat Wave

Analysis: Pakistan Floods, Russia Heat Fit Climate Trends

Although we are all working very hard to wrap up our summer field projects, we have also managed to make time to appreciate the place and people we have become so close with this summer. Orbita has become nothing short of a home for the four of us, encompassing where we do lab work and where we get to hang out after a long days work. Meals have been truly divine. Not only are they delicious but meals are a special time we get to spend with the Zimov’s. Nikita’s two beautiful daughters have finally warmed up to us (so much in fact that the baby allows Travis to play with her). At meals we share stories about adventures, family and culture. To my amazement we have a lot in common with the Zimov’s, even though our homes are very distant. They have welcomed us with open arms, allowing us to join birthday celebrations and even life milestones like the babies first tooth.

The main mission of Polaris Project is to advance arctic research and student skills, both of which I have hopefully accomplished this summer. Underpinning this mission is to build international relationships in order to understand unprecedented changes attributed to global warming. With fewer of us here we have been able to appreciate the Zimov’s contribution to our projects. Nikita has used his knowledge of the area to help find new locations for us to sample. He also engages in our thoughts and ideas, allowing for productive thought.

I believe to build a strong relationship it cannot be science 24/7. Therefore we have taken the liberty to find common passions and share a hint of culture. Valentina, our great cook, taught us how to make Palov (one of our favorite moose stew dishes). In return we taught Valentina how to make chocolate chip cookies. For Anya Zimov’s birthday we gave her the decorated chocolate chip cookie cake and sang happy birthday. Today Nikita, Travis and I went to the gym in Cherskiy to shoot some hoops. All three of us were in our glory, as we all share a common passion for basketball. We are trying to convince Nikita to build a hoop attached to Orbita (I will keep you posted).

Tomorrow I will be traveling to the Anui’s (large tributaries connected to the Kolyma) on what could be my last boat ride of the summer. I will be sure to soak it all up; the landscape, the breeze, the amazing sky, the wisdom, the knowledge, the people, the moments.

After collecting some pretty interesting data from the tundra, I decided it was time to share a bit about my project. As part of the stream team, my project is aimed at answering a simple question: are small arctic streams sources of CO2 to the atmosphere?

To address this question, I needed to measure the concentration of dissolved CO2 (partial pressure of CO2 or pCO2) in the stream sites I visited. If the concentrations of CO2 are high enough above atmospheric levels (~390 parts per million), then CO2 naturally evades from the stream to the atmosphere due to the concentration gradient. To take this one step further, I measured longitudinally along the stream to see if I could detect a loss of CO2 as I moved downstream. In other words, I wanted to directly measure the degassing of CO2 from the stream to atmosphere.

This figure encapsulates some of the trends I’ve been finding:

It shows three sites that shared a definitive waterfall feature where water flowing through the channel dropped abruptly ~.5-1 meters. The turbulence of such a feature allows CO2 to escape from the stream water to the atmosphere. Sure enough, after measuring the CO2 directly above and below the waterfalls, each stream showed a significant decline in dissolved CO2. I should note that most of the streams I have sampled have showed this loss of CO2 generally, measured over the course of the stream. They have also showed very high levels of CO2, some as high as 18,000 ppm (46 times atmospheric).

Aside from degassing, the only other mechanism for a loss in CO2 is through photosynthesis by aquatic algae. Blaize and I conducted a 24-hour pCO2 survey of a nearby stream and found no diurnal trends in CO2 (if there had been photosynthesis, we would have expected a drop in CO2 during the brightest part of the day, when algae are receiving proper sunlight). Furthermore, the CO2 loss displayed in the figure above could not have been due to photosynthesis given the short distance over which the loss was measured. This leaves degassing as the primary loss of CO2 and implicates these small arctic streams as key components to the carbon cycle during the summer months.

More to come.

-Travis

We successfully made the tundra trip in one day and arrived home safe and sound late last night. Now on to a full day of lab work to process our samples!

The fantastic four are just about to board Petnubbin’ (aka Speedy) for a day trip to the tundra. We intend to sample streams and rivers for all of our projects. The weather is ideal for a trip north: cold, windy, and rainy. But don’t worry, we have so many layers on that we can’t walk without wobbling. Furthermore, the barge is parked safely near our destination, so if weather hinders our return, we will seek warmth and refuge in our old home.

More to come! Stay tuned.

-Travis

PS- it snowed on Rodinkha (the nearest hill to the station).

Today is another chilly, blustery day in Cherskiy and as I look wistfully out windows of the lab (the NUT prison) the clouds are scuttling madly across the sky. Luckily though, it is finally sunny after days of cloudy weather which is a significant improvement. Between the previous bout of chilly weather and the wild fires before that, it had been far too long since we’d seen any sun.

Orbita is very quiet today; Joanne, Travis and Blaize are out on a sampling run with Nikita while I catch up on some lab work. We had the realization yesterday that we leave Cherskiy in a little over a week, and there is still so much to do! We have made good progress on our projects, and have another busy week planned but are starting to feel the time crunch. In addition to wrapping up our projects, it seems like we keep coming up with new things that we want to investigate. Yesterday Blaize and Travis sampled Y4 every 3 hours to get a sense of the whether or not pCO2 in the stream fluctuates diurnally, and Joanne and I are going to set up a series of nutrient spiked BOD incubations from a variety of streams to get a broad sense of nutrient limitation in streams across the landscape. We’re hoping to get up to the tundra/Arctic Ocean on Tuesday to sample sites again later in the summer, hopefully just for the day this time.

Living at the station without the clamor associated with Polaris has been totally different than the previous month, and really quite relaxing. I didn’t realize just how loud 25 people can be when all in a room together, and how much organized chaos and activity we generate. With just the four of us going about our business, it seems downright peaceful. We have all enjoyed spending more time with the Zimovs and Davydovs, who have welcomed us into their homes and daily routines. I finally succeeded in holding Dascha, the youngest Zimov, without making her cry – a big success! We’re also getting spoiled by Valentina, who has pulled out all the stops cooking for us. When not forced to feed 30 people at every meal, the food gets significantly more gourmet. Fish pizza, pelmeni (yummy ravioli dumplings), and blinis – yum.

The saddest event since the departure of the rest of the group came a few days ago – we had to say goodbye to the barge. A new group of scientists arrived to study permafrost in the tundra, so the barge took them up north and is their new home. It was so odd saying goodbye to something that has been our home base for 2 summers with the knowledge that this may be our last time here. We lingered on that last night, kept checking to see if we’d left anything, but really just taking it all in and memorizing those little details that we hold so dear – the tippy bench that will flip you off at a moment’s notice, the banya, the walls covered in maps and graphs of our findings this summer, the tables arrayed with 18 different kinds of hot sauce and Old Bay, the front porch strewn with XtraTufs and life jackets after a day in the field. The barge was the object around which we all seemed to orbit, would all come back to after a long day and share stories. Even after the group left, we still had the barge. Now as we walk to breakfast each morning at the guest house, we all look at the empty spot where our floating home should be and miss it and the community that it housed.

I must admit, we are starting to reminisce about all the things we’re excited for when we get home – clean clothes, fresh vegetables, showers with water pressure. We love our home here, but are starting to get excited to see friends and family. More updates will be coming – expect to hear from us after our last tundra trip!

For many of us, the field portion of the Polaris Project was just the beginning. While the scientists have haystacks of data to sift through, I have a stack of 20,000 photos waiting to individually perused, ranked, tagged, and grouped – a task for days and days.

Why do we do it? Because, rather quietly, more countries have set record high temperatures this year than any other single year in history. We have seen the hottest April, May, and June, hottest 12-month period, and hottest decade in the recorded history. Record flooding has destroyed millions of livelihoods in Pakistan, in the type of event that is predicted to become more and more common as temperatures rise. Russia and British Columbia are being devastated by forest fires sweeping through drought-strained forests. A new paper in Nature shows a 40% decline in phytoplankton in the oceans since 1950 because of warming seawater. The phytoplankton are a vital carbon sink, oxygen source, and the foundation of the entire marine food web.

But more on the fires – we flew over a dozen or more on the flights between Cherskiy and Moscow. The smoke was thick from the plane, but satellite views show that smoke is stretching across thousands of miles of Russia – equivalent to a haze from San Fransisco to Chicago. “practically everything is burning,” according to Russian president Medvedev. “…our country has not experienced such a heat wave in the last 50 or even 100 years… Overall, we need to learn our lessons from what has happened, and from the unprecedented heat wave that we have faced this summer. None of us can say what the next summer will be like. The forecasts vary greatly. Everyone is talking about climate change now. Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past.”

This is it folks. Climate change is not some vague threat of milder winters or melting ice. It is wildfires, floods, and hurricanes gaining power and frequency. It is crops, homes, and lives being lost. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.