Kindling For Climate Change—Toolik scientists study the long-term impact of a … fire in the Arctic

August 17, 2009
Volume 87, Number 33
WEB EXCLUSIVE

Kindling For Climate Change

Toolik scientists study the long-term impact of a raging fire in the Arctic

The word "Arctic" tends to conjure images of glaciers, polar bears, icy waters, and frozen tundra. And indeed, all of those are common features of Alaska's North Slope. But as climate change alters the atmosphere and landscape in the Arctic, another image might need to be added to that list: fire.

Researchers at http://www.uaf.edu/toolik/">Toolik Field Station, the National Science Foundation's Arctic long-term ecological research site located about 150 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, are studying the impact of severely burned tundra on the local and global environment.

Though scientists have for years examined burns in Alaska's boreal forest, where fire is a natural part of the growing cycle, the idea of a blazing fire in the tundra is hard to imagine. After all, not too long ago, it was a rarity to see a lightning strike—the source of most forest fires—that far north. John Hobbie, one of the founders of Toolik, remembers a professor at Dartmouth College, where he was an undergraduate in the mid-1950s, telling the class there were no cumulous clouds in the Arctic.

But as the temperature in the Arctic has risen, the number of lightning strikes has increased 20-fold. Because the area is so cold and wet, a strike generally has trouble causing much trouble. In July 2007, lightning hit an area north of camp, near the Anaktuvuk River, starting a fire that smoldered for several weeks before surprising everyone and taking off.

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