Posts tagged #Permafrost

Cli·mate Change

"This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance." - George Orwell - 1984

Wednesday Thoughts

The past few days has made me sick to my stomach over and over again. It makes me so sad that a person with no interest of the environment, now is the leader of such a large country as USA. It makes me upset when people don't seem to understand the consequences with this man in power, a man who over and over again tweets out nonsense and put gags on agencies that studies and/or supports climate science. Human caused climate change IS TRUE, it's not an alternative fact, IT IS A FACT. There is no debate in it when 97% of the per reviewed articles on climate change states that the change in climate is caused by humans. There is something fundamentally wrong when tweeting climate facts is called "going rogue" at the same time as choosing alternative facts as the truth is completely ok.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002

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Dirty Paws and Furry Coat, and the Forest of Talking Trees pt.1

Flashback Friday

Forest of Talking Trees

Today I will take you to one of my absolute favorite places in the whole world. My field site, called CPCRW, short for Caribou-Poker Creek Research Watershed.

The watershed is mainly black spruce, but also quite an abundance of deciduous vegetation, and have a lot of different small and big creatures. We start going out already in May (sometimes even late April), even though most of the snow hasn't even melted yet. Early in the season most of the watershed is brown and you could still see leftover dead plants from last years summer.

The fieldwork doesn't come for free, and if you by chance forget to use mosquito spray you will most likely end up like the pictures below will show. Another thing about mosquitos a lot of people don't understand, if you think there are a lot of mosquitos in the interior and north of Alaska, multiply that by 100 and that is probably closer to the reality. You can not survive without mosquito repellant.

We hike in rubber boots because yeah, we follow rivers. Mosquito spray or a bug shirt is needed.

We Follow Rivers

I have a poster I printed with tons of small pictures I have taken in the watershed through the years and through the seasons. I call it "We follow rivers", because that is what we do. We sample water and try to understand how changes in the landscape affect the streamwater chemistry. Alaska is underlained by permafrost, both continuous and discointinuous, and of course the most southern part is permafrost free. Few people comprehend how large Alaska actually is. Like Sweden it's pretty long, but longer of course (1420 miles; 2285km). Permafrost stores a lot of carbon, old carbon, since it's literally ground that has been frozen (and still is to certain extent) for hundreds and thousands of years. One of the important questions is "How much carbon is being released when permafrost thaws?", because permafrost throughout Alaska is thawing due to the increase in temperature. And of course, we also have the increase in fires and how that actually affects the landscape and stream water chemistry.