When the sun does not set, keeping track of the days becomes problematic. They blend together – yesterday’s sun and sweat fading into today’s rain and thick clouds. Sweet smells are in the air, fresh and crisp after the rain. Flowers are blooming across the landscape. The local botanist, Davidov, says that all the blooming is strange. Most of these plants are supposed to bloom in the fall. They must be confused – the weather patterns are changing in this part of the world. Feedbacks are accelerating the warming locally – sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is melting and turning white surfaces dark blue, and permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a gas that is more than 25x as potent as Carbon Dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

The landscape here  is changing – as permafrost melts, vast regions are subsiding and shifting. In some places, the earth piles itself up like 3-meter smallpox bumps. The time is short. The research being conducted here is critical to understanding the changes in the future and those that are already occurring – but it is not stopping the flow of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. The current is as fast as ever on those rivers of oil called highways. Factories are churning out gigatons of consumer goods (consumer bads?) and gigatons of carbon dioxide. Forests are being clearcut from Washington to Madagascar, from Indonesia to Alberta.

This is what I fight for:

Shuchi Lake, site of much Polaris research