The 4th of July is celebrated on Saturday at Toolik, so today is a regular work day. This is the first day since I arrived last week that I didn’t go out in the field, and it was good to have a chance to catch my breath and think about everything I’ve learned so far.
Yesterday I spotted an American Golden Plover out on the tundra.
While looking at birds is easy, the team’s work here is highly technical and complex, far-ranging, and all interconnected, so it’s a major challenge for me to understand it, and even harder to explain it. Based on the questions I’ve been getting, I put together this video to give some background for non-scientists and show the teams’ approach. Before watching the video, these are the key points to keep in mind:
- carbon dioxide is a “greenhouse gas” that contributes to global warming
- carbon dioxide can be produced from carbon compounds
- the Arctic tundra contains an enormous amount of frozen carbon compounds, which could be converted to carbon dioxide if global warming thaws the permafrost (which is happening already)
- in light of these factors, the team is studying what happens to carbon when the permafrost thaws, to better understand what the impact on climate will be
Later we’ll talk about methane, another carbon-based greenhouse gas, but for now I’m trying to keep it simple:
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