The Middle of Nowhere

What Alaska's Tundra is Teaching Scientists About Climate Change

At two o'clock in the afternoon on July 16, 2007, a bolt of lightning struck the tundra along the Anaktuvuk River, 20 miles from Toolik Lake, Alaska. This was unusual.

Toolik Lake lies on the gently listing and all but untrammeled North Slope of Alaska's Brooks Range. Situated 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Toolik is about as middle-of-nowhere as nowhere can get. In part because of its remoteness, the lake and its environs have drawn a growing number of scientists who spend weeks each summer at the Toolik Field Station conducting research on the arctic environment. The station is a bustling encampment of high-tech trailer labs and WeatherPORT sleeping huts surrounded by mile after mile of squishy tundra, dry heath, and thousands of shallow lakes. Back in 1975, when the field station was first established, thunder and lightning were a novelty, says John O'Brien, an aquatic ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and one of the station's founders. "There were lots of books back then saying there are no thunderstorms here. Now they're common."

The lightning near the Anaktuvuk sparked a fire. This too was unusual: common wisdom held that the tundra on the North Slope was too wet to burn. But average temperatures have been steadily rising at Toolik, as elsewhere in the Arctic. The summer of 2007 was the warmest on record at the station and the driest in memory. Not until early October was the fire finally extinguished by the arrival of snow. All told, it burned nearly 400 square miles, an area about the size of Cape Cod. It was the largest tundra fire in Alaska -- and perhaps global -- history.

To the unscientific eye, arctic tundra presents a rather bland and uniform landscape. In fact it is a rich and varied ecosystem: a mix of mosses, lichens, and liverworts, sedges, grasses, and dwarf shrubs. A foot or two down one strikes permafrost, but the unfrozen layer on top offers plenty of room for voles, hares, ground squirrels, bumblebees, nesting birds, and other creatures great and small. The tundra ecosystem is not fragile so much as slow to change, which makes it an ideal site for long-term research. From June through August, dozens of scientists and students prod the tundra, scoop critters from lakes and streams, measure, weigh, and document, all while coping with the mercurial weather and fending off swarms of mosquitoes.

Their findings are increasingly and consistently troubling: rising temperatures, melting permafrost, changing streamflows, a net loss of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Scientists suspect that the retreat of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean is causing a shift in weather patterns that is making the region both drier and more prone to lightning. The Anaktuvuk fire is one more harbinger of profound change.

In the early 1970s, a young john o'brien was working in Barrow, Alaska, with a team of biologists led by John Hobbie, an aquatic ecologist from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The North Slope, with its thousands of interconnected lakes, was a wonderland for scientists like O'Brien and Hobbie. But it was inaccessible by road.

That changed after petroleum was discovered 200 miles east at Prudhoe Bay, and a grueling 400-mile road was built to bring in equipment and aid construction of a pipeline. With several colleagues, Hobbie drove down the Haul Road (now the Dalton Highway) looking for a large, deep, easily accessible lake to compare with the shallow pools around Barrow. They found it at Toolik, near a construction camp. The biologists pitched their tents nearby and got to work, occasionally visiting the camp to do laundry or take an ice-cream bar from the freezer.

Initially established for aquatic research, Toolik soon became known as a convenient place for terrestrial ecologists to camp, borrow indoor lab space, and eat a warm meal. Gus Shaver was one of them. In 1976 he'd recently finished his doctorate at Duke University and was looking for sites where he could study how native plants might be used to revegetate disturbed areas. The road in those days was busy with "big machines, big men, dust clouds, and lots and lots of traffic all moving very fast," Shaver recalls. Toolik was a natural place for a naturalist to stop: a friendly oasis, with basic amenities.

In 1977 the construction crews departed. Grizzlies and wolves, drawn by the crews' liberal distribution of food scraps, were slower to leave. In 1983 the Toolik Field Station moved across the lake to its current location, and the University of Alaska assumed full-time management. Since then the station has acquired a new lab more or less every year, along with a few pickup trucks and a helicopter. It also offers wireless high-speed Internet access, surprisingly delicious meals, and a cedar-plank sauna. (The original station had a sauna too, but one winter, after some hunters gutted a caribou in it, it was ripped apart by a grizzly.)

Toolik is now the world's most advanced laboratory for arctic ecosystems research. Early work focused on what Hobbie calls "documenting the system": surveying plants and animals, measuring biomass and streamflow, detecting daily and annual changes. Experiments -- such as adding nutrients to lakes or plots of tundra to see how the systems would respond -- soon began. Much of that research continues as part of the Long Term Ecological Research network, which is studying two dozen ecosystems across the United States on 20- to 30-year time scales.

Toolik will soon become part of the National Ecological Observatory Network, a group of some 60 sites where scientists are gathering and comparing long-term environmental observations. The station is already part of the Arctic Observing Network, a suite of research sites north of the Arctic Circle at which scientists are trying to discern how a warming planet will change these sensitive places, and how those changes may affect the rest of the world.

The words "climate change" conjure images of industrial smokestacks, urban sprawl, the mercury inching upward on the thermometer. But what ultimately is involved is biogeochemistry, the movement of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and other elements through the earth's various systems: from soil to stream, leaf to air, coal to smoke, rain to soil, and around again. Tracking this movement is central to predicting how warming temperatures will affect, say, plant growth in the Amazon or Appalachia or the Arctic.

 The data from Toolik are particularly valuable. The arctic ecosystem has few players, so it is relatively easy to study how nutrients flow through it. The system also serves as a good basic model for how more complex ecosystems may respond to climate change. Moreover, simple as it is, arctic tundra holds at least 10 percent of the world's terrestrial carbon. As temperatures rise, how much carbon will be turned into CO2, how much CO2 will shift into new plant growth, and how much will go into the atmosphere? The Arctic may seem like nowhere, but what happens there will resonate globally.

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