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A Homer scientist is bringing changes in Arctic permafrost into high-resolution

With permafrost thaw in the Arctic rapidly outpacing previous projections, researchers are racing to understand the impacts of an increasingly unstable future.

After growing up in Sweden, Anna Liljedahl moved to Alaska to study hydrology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She now lives in Homer, where she conducts research as an associate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, focusing on how climate change is impacting water in Arctic ecosystems.

Read more on Alaska Public Media.

In October 2022, Scotty Creek Research Station—a prominent climate research facility in the Northwest Territories (NWT) of Canada—was almost entirely consumed by an unusually late-season wildfire. With five out of nine of the station’s buildings destroyed and an estimated two million dollars of damage to onsite housing, research equipment, solar panels, and lab space, the fire was a “gut punch” to one of the only Indigenous-led climate research stations in the world. But, with support from Permafrost Pathways, the Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation (LKFN) who now lead the facility are focusing their attention on rebuilding.

A cruel irony: when the impacts of climate change thwart climate research

The fire that destroyed Scotty Creek Research Station had been active for almost 100 days before finally reaching the camp. Usually, the area sees rain or snow for almost half of the month in October, and historically, it has even snowed as much as 12 inches with temperatures sometimes dropping as low as negative two degrees Fahrenheit (-19 degrees Celsius). But drier conditions, abnormally warm weather, and heavy winds in late 2022 led to an extended and extraordinarily active fire season in the NWT—which exceeded its 10-year average of total fires burned, with over 1.3 million acres affected by fire.

“It was just heartbreaking,” William Alger, LKFN’s lead Dehcho guardian at Scotty Creek told CKLB Radio after being the first to witness the extensive destruction left in the fire’s wake last fall. But now, “it’s just a matter of picking up the pieces and figuring out where we go from here,” Alger said.

Climate change is making it harder to conduct climate research, a harsh reality that the fire at Scotty Creek tragically represents. The obstruction of data collection and ecological stewardship caused by frequent environmental disasters is becoming a recurring setback, presenting a daunting challenge for carrying out this work in a perpetually warming world.

“I can’t help but notice the irony that a subarctic research station dedicated to understanding climate change burned down in mid-October due to a wildfire,” William Quinton, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and the original founder of Scotty Creek Research Station, said in an interview for CBC News.

The unusual time of year made it difficult to attack the fire, as temperatures suddenly plummeted and strong winds began to pick up. For several days leading up to the weekend of October 15th, the Scotty Creek team anxiously watched the fire burn closer and closer to the camp, mentally preparing for the worst but hoping for the best.

Unfortunately, common techniques for combating wildfire, such as cutting fire breaks and setting up sprinklers, failed when the cold snap led to the territory’s environment and natural resources department (ENR) removing sprinkler systems they feared would freeze—drawing criticism from LKFN—and changes in wind direction forced the early evacuation of research teams and firefighting crews helping out on the ground. Additionally, helicopters trying to combat the flames from the air were unable to pull water from surrounding water bodies that had begun to freeze over.

“When we’re fighting fires and protecting structures, it is highly unusual for there to be the threat of freezing temperatures,” Mike Westwick, a wildfire information officer for the territory wrote in an email to CBC News.

Impacts from the burning of Scotty Creek extend far beyond the research station and will have a ripple effect on the economies of nearby communities that benefit from the droves of international researchers coming to this unique region every year to study environmental change caused by rapid warming. The visitors Scotty Creek draws to the Fort Simpson area provide steady income to local businesses including hotels, grocery stores, and airlines.

“The loss of Scotty Creek facilities is going to have a series of impacts that will have an ongoing effect on our already delicate local economy. Our hotels, bed and breakfasts, and charter airlines will take the biggest hit. Important climate change research, youth education, and the economic activities that are part of keeping it going will now be temporarily halted” LKFN Chief Kele Antoine said in a press release.

A remote research station with worldwide influence

Since its founding in 1999, Scotty Creek has been a place to study the various impacts of climate change and permafrost thaw on delicate northern ecosystems in the Dehcho (“big river”) region where the facility is based. The station included an all-season research camp that doubled as an outdoor classroom and laboratory space. It established itself as one of Canada’s major northern research stations and the data collected there over the course of decades is now used by organizations across the globe, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the years since its founding, the Scotty Creek Research Station experienced extreme landscape change firsthand — in 2012 they relocated due to thawing permafrost threatening the facility’s infrastructure. This type of fast-paced ecological change, known all too well by communities in the Dehcho and the rest of the Arctic, is what drew researchers across environmental disciplines to Scotty Creek, sparking new lines of scientific inquiry, educating young climate scientists, and even inspiring artists like Dominik Heilig to turn the unique history of Scotty Creek into a journalistic graphic novel.

The station marked another historical milestone in August 2022, just months before the fire, when a special ceremony was held to transfer ownership of the station to LKFN—making Scotty Creek Canada’s first Indigenous-led climate research station, and one of just a few Indigenous-led climate research stations in the world.

Indigenizing northern climate science to protect ancestral lands and traditional ways of life

Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ means “the place where the rivers come together” in the Dene Zhatie language, and the people of LKFN are the traditional keepers of the land and water of what is now known as Fort Simpson. Guided by Dene principles and values, LKFN has committed to uplifting their culture through intergenerational education and building connections that respect their traditional language (learn how to pronounce Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ People), elder and youth voices, and their self-determination as land stewards. For LKFN, taking the lead at Scotty Creek Research Station was a new way to honor that commitment.

LKFN’s director of lands and resources Dieter Cazon told Cabin Radio that a major goal of Scotty Creek Research Station has been to foster ethical climate research that combines Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and western science for a more holistic, co-produced understanding of the compounding climate impacts being experienced by First Nations in the region and how to adapt to environmental change.

“This collaborative work we’re doing together is going to be the only way we’re going to figure a lot of these answers out,” Cazon told CBC News.

The western scientific approach has a fraught history of unethical and disrespectful engagement with Indigenous peoples while working on their lands. At its worst, Arctic research has exploited communities for data collection that benefited their own research, without ever returning findings back to the villages where it was conducted. Other times it has ignored them altogether, failing to meet the needs and wishes of the communities and dismissing Indigenous Knowledge as a legitimate way of knowing.
“Too often in the past, scientists like me came north and then headed south without sharing the results of what they found,” Quinton said in an interview with Yale Environment. “It led to some distrust, even pushback in some cases. Partnering with Indigenous communities has changed that. A management approach that puts them in leadership positions is also critical because it’s their land now and their livelihood that’s at stake. They can also ground-truth what we are seeing or missing.”

According to Cazon, in the past Scotty Creek has contributed to this inequity. But the transition of ownership to LKFN places Scotty Creek among a growing movement of Indigenous-led research initiatives challenging this old model of science. Indigenous community members and researchers will collaboratively address the impacts of climate change in the circumpolar region, which Indigenous communities often face the brunt of. Any raw data now collected at the station is co-owned by LKFN. Researchers must demonstrate an understanding of the communities they will be working in before they arrive and uphold their commitment to respect the land and local people through ethical research practices onsite.

From the ashes, Scotty Creek rebuilds

The important research happening at Scotty Creek stalled in the months following last year’s fire, but not for long. LKFN has already begun the rebuilding process, with an eye towards improving the station’s resiliency in the face of what have become perpetual threats to the region due to climate change.

“It’s very unlikely that this is a one-off. I’m sure that things are changing, and that we will see this again, and for that reason—we need to be prepared” Quinton told CBC News.

Working with Dr. Oliver Sonnentag, an associate professor at the Université de Montréal and longtime researcher at Scotty Creek, Permafrost Pathways is supporting LKFN in their efforts to rebuild Scotty Creek, primarily the reinstallation of an essential carbon monitoring tower used to measure greenhouse gas fluctuations as they move between soils, plants, and the atmosphere. Woodwell Climate’s Dr. Kyle Arndt and Marco Montemayor, members of the Permafrost Pathways carbon flux network team, spent two weeks in March assisting LKFN and Dr. Sonnentag’s team with restoring the charred tower site, which has now been resurrected and is on its way to being fully operational.

“It’s very unique and essentially unheard of to have a decade of data that predated a wildfire and then be able to rebuild in the exact same location to be able to make a direct post-fire comparison,” Arndt said. “So, to help reassemble the tower site was an exciting opportunity for Permafrost Pathways to continue supporting LKFN and the Scotty Creek Research Station. From a scientific standpoint, getting that tower site up and running again will ultimately yield really interesting data.”

Keeping this tower operational will contribute to filling persistent carbon monitoring gaps across the Arctic where 80% of the Arctic landscape is not currently represented by year-round monitoring sites because data collection in these environments is often challenging and difficult to sustain financially. Permafrost Pathways is strategically identifying and closing these data gaps by upgrading and installing new equipment across the Arctic to reduce scientific uncertainty in current carbon budgets and future projections. More complete data will drastically improve permafrost emissions estimates, removing a major barrier to their incorporation into climate policy and adaptation strategies.

Scotty Creek Research Station is an invaluable contributor to this pan-Arctic carbon monitoring network, providing essential data for a territory experiencing rapid environmental change across the region. Permafrost Pathways will continue supporting Scotty Creek throughout recovery and beyond so that the station can continue hosting visitors, and serving local communities and scientists.

“Another goal of the restored tower site is to get more Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation peoples involved with maintenance of equipment and data collection,” Montemayor said. “This way, lines of communication are kept open, which allows for more data transparency and knowledge exchange while continuing to bring in diverse skill sets from members of the local community whose land this tower operates on.”

LKFN hopes the station will be able to partially reopen by August 2023. Although the wildfire claimed a large percentage of the research facility, Quinton said that the flames couldn’t destroy the partnerships and connections that Scotty Creek has built and nurtured over the years. “And that’s going to be the foundation on which we build and move forward.”

 

IPCC report will likely shake up U.N. climate talks

Scientists say countries need to cut emissions far deeper to prevent catastrophic warming. That fact will hang over delegates when they meet later this year at the annual U.N. climate talks

When global leaders meet later this year to negotiate climate action, the urgency to cut planet-warming emissions will be starker than ever before.

The world now needs to cut emissions by 60 percent by 2035 — compared with 2019 levels — to avoid increasingly severe heat, flooding, drought and extreme weather that will make parts of the world unlivable. That’s a key conclusion of the latest assessment from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is made up of the world’s leading climate scientists.

Continue reading on Scientific American.

Representatives from Acre participate in an event on the degradation of the Amazon Forest (Portuguese)

Representing Acre by the Company for the Development of Environmental Services of Acre (CDSA), president José Luiz Gondim and the company’s project director, Rosangela Benjamim, participated in the event “Degradation of the Amazon forests: a dialogue between science and society in search of solutions”, held this week at the research campus of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, in Belém (PA).

Continue reading on Notícias do Acre.

June 29, 2022— When Susan Tessier and her husband, Tim, went out for the day, they had a lake on their Native allotment. When they came back, It was gone. 

“My husband Tim and I left home in the morning and when we came back around 8:00 in the evening the whole lake had drained,” she writes in a post on the Local Environmental Observation Network site—a community science website where observers can report unusual changes in their local environment. “There was a hole that had blown out and it had drained into the ocean… It looked like it was blown up with dynamite.”

Water is the ecosystem engineer in the Arctic. The lowland tundra landscape is a network of lakes and streams, mosaicked across an expanse of frozen ground riddled with wedges of ice. The freezing, thawing, moving, eroding dynamics of these features shape the larger landscape, and determine the habitats of fish, birds, plants, mammals—and, of course people—living in the Arctic. 

Abrupt lake drainage, like Tessier described, is just one way that changes in water and ice can influence the landscape, but a recent review paper conducted by University of Florida Postdoctoral Associate, Dr. Elizabeth Webb, and Woodwell Climate Associate Scientist, Dr. Anna Liljedahl, indicates events like this may become more common as the climate warms— overtaking lake expansion and slowly drying out the Arctic tundra.

Evidence of lake drainage across the literature

This new paper comes on the heels of a 2022 study that Drs. Webb and Liljedahl also authored, which came to the same conclusion: despite the processes of lake expansion and drainage continuing simultaneously across the Arctic, net lake area is trending downward. The Arctic is getting dryer.

The review complements the strengths of the previous study, compensating for some of the limitations of using geographically coarse remote sensing data. Synthesizing data from 139 sites across the Arctic, pulled from 57 different studies, Drs. Webb and Liljedahl were able to corroborate their own past findings. 

“Lake size can vary from one season to the next in response to factors like precipitation or evaporation, so if you’re only looking at a limited set of remote sensing images, that can influence a trend analysis,” explains Dr. Webb. “It’s actually really exciting from a scientific rigor perspective to have two completely different remote sensing methods showing the same result.”

The review also adds weight to the idea that permafrost thaw is the primary driver in the loss of Arctic lakes. A large portion of Arctic soil is ice-rich, perennially frozen ground called permafrost, and as the climate heats up, it has begun to thaw and destabilize. That thawing can both create new ponds, and help drain them. The review indicates that decreases in size and number of Arctic lakes are more prevalent than expected, dominating the dynamic in some areas.

This contradicts another leading theory that changes in precipitation and evaporation rates— called the “water balance hypothesis” — are driving changes in lake area. Prior to Drs. Webb and Liljedahl’s investigations, the prevailing thought was that lake creation would outpace drainage rates, for at least the next several decades. 

Climate Change is Opening Drainage Channels in the Permafrost

It works like this: most Arctic lakes form when wedges of ice in permafrost melt, leaving behind a depression that fills with water. The water absorbs and holds more heat, slowly thawing and eroding surrounding permafrost, growing from puddle to pond to lake over the years.

Drainage can happen in one of two ways. The first is vertically, which occurs when the permafrost beneath the lake thaws down to the unfrozen ground beneath, allowing the water to seep out the bottom. This can take hundreds or thousands of years, depending on how deep the permafrost is.

The second way is horizontally, through what Dr. Liljedahl calls “capillaries”. Ice wedges are common across the Arctic, connected by an underground network of ice that pushes the soil above them upwards as they grow, creating ridges that impede water flow. But when the tops of these wedges melt, the ridged ground above them subsides, forming narrow channels between lakes and ponds. When an expanding lake meets one of these capillary channels, the lake can drain in a matter of hours, as if the plug has been pulled on a bathtub drain.

“The formation of lateral drainage channels can interrupt this lake expansion process at any time, and I think that’s what’s making it override expansion and cause the net drying effect,” Dr. Liljedahl says. “The lake that took millenia to grow can be gone in a couple of hours.

Fewer Arctic Lakes Leave Communities in the Lurch

So what does an Arctic with fewer lakes mean? In terms of carbon, the picture isn’t clear. Since lake expansion— a common source of methane emissions— and lake drainage are happening concurrently, the net effect is not easy to discern. 

“With lake drainage, it’s much less clear what the carbon consequences are. The current thinking is that lake expansion releases orders of magnitude more carbon than lake drainage, but because it’s complicated, we’re not quite sure,” says Dr. Webb.  “It’s definitely an open research question.”

Dr. Liljedahl notes that there is also documentation of permafrost recovering and re-growing in drained lake beds. “Over decades, they could develop new ice-wedges and vegetation on the surface. Lake beds could experience net carbon accumulation for at least a couple of decades after drainage,” Dr. Liljedahl says.

However, the ecological consequences of fewer Arctic lakes are more certain. Fish and other aquatic species will have the size of their habitat reduced and their freedom of migration restricted, as lakes drain and connecting streams dry up. Species that feed on fish or rely on wetland vegetation, like muskrats, will also be impacted.

Small lakes are an important source of freshwater for Arctic communities. Tessier wrote in her post about the lake drainage she witnessed, “We are sad to lose the lake because in winter, after it froze up, we used to go cut ice chunks for drinking water. It has really clear water. If we get enough snow we can use snow water instead, but it is not as good.”

As more lakes drain, clean freshwater could become harder to access. Combined with the destabilization of the ground itself as permafrost thaws, Arctic communities are facing massive changes.

Dr. Liljedahl hopes that refining our understanding of water dynamics in the Arctic will aid adaptation measures. She has been awarded a three year NSF grant to continue studying the ice wedge capillary network and its role in the Arctic hydrological system. She’ll use remote sensing to quantify the distribution of the ice-wedges contributing to increased drainage. She also plans to pull data from field measurements to figure out how permanent the capillaries are, since vegetation feedback loops could help permafrost recover and return the surface to its original elevation. 

“We have more to do before we can feel like the models are representing a realistic scenario. We need to better understand what is happening at the sub-meter scale with water, because the presence or absence of surface water will have a major impact on how the landscape evolves,” Dr. Liljedahl says.

Read more on Mongabay.

The Biden administration has called for protecting mature US forests to slow climate change, but it’s still allowing them to be logged

Forests are critically important for slowing climate change. They remove huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – 30% of all fossil fuel emissions annually – and store carbon in trees and soils. Old and mature forests are especially important: They handle droughts, storms and wildfires better than young trees, and they store more carbon.

In a 2022 executive order, President Joe Biden called for conserving mature and old-growth forests on federal lands. Recently Biden protected nearly half of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska from road-building and logging.

Read more on The Conversation.

Vineyard carbon study could aid local climate fight

A new effort to understand how land management across the Vineyard can help fight climate change is hoped to serve as a model for other communities looking for ways to battle global warming.

The Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole has embarked on a study with the Martha’s Vineyard Commission and Sheriff’s Meadow to figure out how much carbon the Island’s natural landscape can hold. In doing so, the groups hope to uncover opportunities to store more carbon through nature and prevent it from being released into the atmosphere — a strategy that could be translated to mainland towns looking to do their bit.

Read more on The Vineyard Gazette.