[Laney Siegner, ERG graduate student]

Yoga at Grand Central Bridge outside Nome, AK. Photo credit: Ori Chafe

“You’ve been lucky with the weather, that’s for sure,” the woman said. “Last summer it was raining every day this time of year. Follows a low-snow winter. Last winter was a big snow year, so this summer has been nicer weather. Good thing you’re leaving before the rains really set in -- all of October and November will be cold and drenching rains. Used to be we’d have snow by Halloween, but these days it’s more like December that we’re getting the first snows.”

Conversations about the weather fill the small, cozy room in Pingo Bakery and Seafood café. The weather is never far from an Alaskan’s mind. Here in Nome, an outpost of the Seward Peninsula on the Bering Sea, everyone has noticed the striking pace of the weather’s change over the years, from later snows to earlier thaws to more dramatic rains. Climate change is openly acknowledged by many, including Alaska’s Republican senator Lisa Murkowski. But the state is simultaneously lamenting the problem, searching for solutions, and supporting oil and gas drilling, the building blocks of the state’s economy. It is a place that is experiencing the direct impacts of climate change most rapidly and still struggling to implement solutions.

I came up to Nome, a major destination of the Yukon Gold Rush and finish line of the Iditarod dog sled race, to assist with ongoing research into the changing dynamics of the Arctic ecosystem. The project is a collaboration of several academic institutions and national labs and aims to inform climate models with better information about Arctic plant communities, ecosystem processes, and feedbacks. I spent the last week of August traveling out into the tussock tundra landscape to count shrub seedlings and take soil microclimate data from several plots 70 to 80 miles outside of Nome.

Driving down the dirt roads out of town each day afforded ample opportunity to observe and learn about the natural history of Alaska’s North Slope, a land of extremes dominated by shrub and grass plant communities north of the tree line. We observed solifluction lobes, creeping lumps of soil on hillslopes reflecting differential downhill flow rates of glacial deposits, sorted circles of rocks left behind by the last glaciation, and pingos, mounds of earth-covered ice from drained lakebeds. We also witnessed rough-legged hawks swooping across the road, a red fox roaming along a river bank, and a wild musk ox herd grazing on the grasses. The musk ox hair, qiviut, is prized for its strength and water resistance and is incredibly soft, a great source of extra insulation in jacket pockets when found in the field.

The first three days we visited plots near Quartz Creek to count how many birch, alder, and willow seedlings had come up since being seeded in June. We also took soil cores, temperature measurements, soil moisture, and vegetation measurements at each plot. The depth to the permafrost layer, between 50-70 cm in most of my measurements, is growing as permafrost warms. This causes all sorts of problems: pools of water at the surface, soil collapse, changing water flow paths, and release of carbon (primarily methane or CO2, depending on whether the soil is wet or dry). The research team is gathering data in the amount and form of carbon released.

Traversing the tussocks to access the field plots takes some getting used to. You’re either stepping around the tussocks into some mystery sinkhole, or on top of them if they’re large and stable enough to support a boot. Rainboots and rain pants are key to navigating a boggy crossing, with water rising to knee height. It’s a good leg workout, rewarded with ripe alpine blueberries all around us for snacking. Colors are changing already. The birch leaves turn from green to orange, yellow, and red, and the tones of fall grow more pronounced each day. Change happens fast, this far north.

In the evenings in Nome, the days seem endless with light stretching on towards midnight. We had to draw thick curtains over the windows to get some rest. On the flip side, we woke in the dark, as the sunrise didn’t strike the horizon until around 8 am. I read up on the natural history of the region, whaling, and climate change research before bed, appreciative of the context to put all the information into perspective.

The last day in the field, we drove down a different road towards the town of Council, a community of mostly summer homes (there is one year-round resident) situated to the east of Nome. At the end of the road, residents must drive through the riverbed to access the houses across the river, assuming the river level is navigable. Like many communities along the water, boats are increasingly necessary to access the homes. We traveled along the coast of the Bering Sea before turning inland, where hilly tundra terrain replaced the vibrant green wetlands. White spruce trees became occasional as we approached the tree line. There was a last grove of spruce trees in a line right by the field site.

We took greenhouse gas emissions of twenty plots in the area using a portable gas analyzer, a remarkable piece of technology that gives measurements of CO2 and methane in real time. It is still in want of some features, such as reporting of its battery SOC, a shorter warm-up time, and more consistent calibration, but is nevertheless impressive in what it can do. We took CO2 and methane readings within a clear chamber, to measure net flux, and an opaque chamber, to capture soil and plant respiration without photosynthesis. This was a fascinating process to observe as it may also be relevant to my agricultural research and prospective future projects in which I may measure emissions from sites treated with compost, biochar, or both.

I spent my last morning in Nome running along the beach, observing the gold dredging equipment and ships out at sea on a cloudy, cool late summer morning. I went to Pingo to warm up with coffee and the largest cinnamon roll I’ve ever been served. I shared in more conversations about the weather with a waitress who just moved in June to Nome from Mississippi. She seemed sanguine about facing her first winter here and pleased with her new home. She had followed her wife up here who had gotten a job as a nurse, and wasn’t looking back.

As we talked about Alaska, Mississippi, and my home in Washington, D.C., I gained a real appreciation for the cultural and geographic diversity of this country. The range of ecosystems is extreme, from tundra to tropical coastline. Learning firsthand about the human reactions to life in such places motivates me to continue my work as a climate researcher and educator and keep building knowledge about climate narratives and science.

Burned tussock tundra

Sorted Circles left by last glaciation

Wild musk ox on the tussock tundra

Building on Nome's Front Street covered in west-facing solar panels

Nome at 10:30PM

Town of Council across the river

Nome beachfront on the Bering Sea

Views of the Bendlebens in clouds

Rainbow on the way to Quartz Creek

Last train to nowhere

[Gordon Bauer, ERG graduate student]

The northern lights outside Barrow. Photo credit: Ori Chafe.

A few weeks ago, ERG Professor Margaret Torn sent a cryptic department-wide email inquiring if anyone would like to assist in ecological research in northern Alaska as part of the Next Generation Emerging Ecosystems – Arctic project. I thought for a few moments about how disruptive and inconvenient this would be: two days lost in transit, foregone work time with deadlines fast approaching, and evenings spent alone in an icy wasteland. Then I thought about opportunities that only come once in a lifetime, and impulsively sent out an emphatic yes. One thing led to another, and then suddenly I found myself in a taxi to the airport at 4am, bound for Barrow, Alaska on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

“The sea has given us so many gifts…it can have my body.” My main motivation for going to the Arctic was the physical place: I wanted to experience the icy landscape extending as far as the eye can see, the northern sun low in the sky, and the chance to see polar bears, arctic foxes, and the aurora borealis. I was not disappointed. On our second night in Barrow, we laid in a snowbank for over an hour with approximately 50 layers of clothing to protect against the polar wind, staring in awe as giant green ghosts danced across the sky. At one point an arctic fox scampered by, pausing to ponder what we were doing there. On the third day it snowed, and the Arctic Ocean turned into a giant slushie, the waves barely strong enough to break.

The work itself was a refreshing break from the office: every morning, we snowmobiled out to a field site in the tundra in the pre-dawn 10am light, dismantled frozen monitoring equipment for a few hours, and then transported it to a warehouse via sled as the sun set around 3pm. For the past five years, this equipment has been used to take incredibly detailed measurements of the arctic ecosystem and the evolving interactions between the ecosystem and climate. Among other things, an eddy flux tower measures carbon dioxide and methane released from the melting permafrost, while an elevated tram system measures changes in flora and energy balance along a 40-meter cross section. The monitoring station is dismantled for the winter every November, and set up again in the spring.

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Ori Chafe (right) and Stan Wulschlegger take sensors off the eddy flux tower, as ERGie Richard Barnes (left) looks on.

Richard packs up equipment for the winter.

The daily commute.

Ori (left) and Richard enjoy some Arctic pumpkin pie.

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However, what I found most fascinating and inspiring about Barrow was not the science nor the landscape, but the community itself. A hub of Inupiaq culture and one of the few places in North America with active whale hunting (bowhead whales serve as a crucial source of food for the community), Barrow feels at once foreign and utterly American. On our second night in Barrow, I drove into town with Richard Barnes—my ERG companion on the trip—to take in the sights. In many ways, Barrow looks like any other small American town, with a few key differences. The wooden homes are all on stilts to maintain stability during permafrost melt, and outside the mayor’s office on the main street sits a bowhead whale skull the size of a small car.

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Richard admiring the lawn decoration outside the Barrow mayor’s office.

The Arctic Hotel in Barrow.

When Brussel sprouts are $6.99/lb, vegetarianism isn’t the most practical option.

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“When someone says they support 'America first,' you have to wonder, does the America they are talking about include Barrow, Alaska?” Sadly, that arctic environment is changing rapidly, and it isn’t clear how much longer Barrow will continue to exist in its current location. As the sea ice melts earlier in the spring and takes longer to form in the fall, the waves have more time to erode the land. The flooding has become a serious problem. Already, residents have had to relocate some ancestral grave sites, and many fishing cabins outside of town have been swept away. Within the next 20 years, it is possible that all of Barrow will have to move. But in the face of inevitable destruction, we also saw signs of resilience. When we talked about the need to relocate graves, one woman we met said, “The sea has given us so many gifts…it can have my body.” She spoke with excitement about relocating to a village in the mountains.

My visit to Barrow was a strong reminder of the diversity of this crazy country we call home, and of the fragility of life at the frontier. When someone says they support “America first,” you have to wonder, does the America they are talking about include Barrow, Alaska? If so, supporting America first means supporting a diversity of cultures and world views. It means supporting not just a way of life associated with coal mining, but one associated with whaling, frozen tundra, and polar ice caps as well. Perhaps above all, supporting America first means doing all we can to stop climate change.

[by Tanya Dimitrova, crosspost from Mongabay.com] 

Benigno Hernandez and Odair Canales from Hondupalma cooperative look out for a troop of monkeys in a former palm oil plantation, now set aside to regrow as a secondary forest. “This forest keeps our stream running, ” says Canales when asked why they stopped growing palms there. (Photo by Tanya Dimitrova.)   

David Reyes plunges his hand into a black smelly liquid at the bottom of a cut-off plastic jug tied around a palm tree and pulls out a dead horned beetle. “We used to put insecticide on the bottom of these traps,” says Reyes, the agricultural manager of Hondupalma – a cooperative of small landowners in Honduras that produces palm oil. “Now we simply use alcohol with sugar cane molasses to kill off the bugs.” According to Reyes, these new measures saved the co-op $175,000 in pesticide costs over the past two years.

Hondupalma recently achieved a Rainforest Alliance certification for sustainable growth of African palms – the first cooperative in the world to feature the famous green frog seal on the cooking oil they sell. Palm oil (generically labeled as vegetable oil) is used in almost all consumer products on the market: from ice cream and ramen noodle soup to toothpaste and candles. Expanding oil palm plantations are among the top reasons for deforestation globally, along with cattle ranching, timber, and soy.

The improvements achieved by the cooperative extend beyond reduced chemical use.

Continue reading on Mongabay.com

Note: The views expressed here belong solely to the author of each entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

By Jess Reilly

Thanks to the recent dedication of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS), the corresponding scathing article in the Wall Street Journal, and Dan Kammen and Tonio Buonassisi’s appearance on NPR’s On Point, Ivanpah and solar energy in general has been back in the news.

Tortoise at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

ISEGS is a concentrating solar plant (CSP) driven by technology from BrightSource Energy: it uses mirrors to reflect the sun’s light to the top of tower, where the heat turns water to steam. This steam then turns a turbine and generates electricity. CSP has the added benefit of heating a salt medium that can store the heat with minimal losses. Therefore, the plant can provide electricity to the grid not only during the day when the sun is shining, but at night as well. This storage reduces the intermittency of the CSP energy supply and allows the plant to compete with other ‘baseload’ energy supplies like coal and natural gas.

ISEGS happens to be the largest example of concentrating solar in the world, with 360,000 garage-door-sized mirrors and three giant towers sprawled over 5 square miles of Mojave desert. It generates electricity just north of Interstate 5 at the Nevada-California line and transmits to southern California.

Burrow excavation at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

I walked nearly every inch of those five miles when I worked as a biologist at ISEGS. I was there from the moment the first bulldozer broke ground in the Ivanpah Valley in 2010, under the regal summit of Clark Mountain, until I came to ERG as a graduate student in the fall of 2012.

Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

I returned to graduate school in large part because I could not stand to supervise the destruction of the desert anymore. Having lived and worked in this fragile and biologically diverse desert since 2001, I watched my backyard plowed under for energy that would feed the demand of 140,000 homes hundreds of miles to the west. It did not seem environmentally or socially equitable. After living and working in the Ivanpah valley for two years, I promised this valley I would not let it be further destroyed, and I went back to school to figure out how to protect it.

Here’s what I have discovered:

Solar power protects Ivanpah Valley.

Horned lizard at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

This is not to say that Ivanpah got it right. I was witness to painful foibles throughout the process as it stumbled forward. It has been a learning experience for everyone involved, from federal agencies to technology innovators.

Yet the very plant that displaced hundreds of tortoises may be the very thing that will save these individuals, their species, and ours.

An energy system built with renewables is necessary if the Mojave desert ecosystem, including the desert tortoise and all its migratory birds, are to survive into the coming generations. Previously, I did not fully understand the implications of a grid that continues to rely on fossil fuels.  But at 400 ppm of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and rising, many habitats and backyards are changing. Global sea level rise is now almost 7 inches higher than pre-industrial times, with the rate of increase today nearly double that of the last century. The extent and thickness of sea ice has dropped dramatically. Glaciers are retreating, and cities that rely on their consistent water supply are looking into a near future where they have no water for their millions of inhabitants.

Kangaroo rat at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

Therefore, utility-scale CSP is an effective way to bring renewable energy online right now, in tandem with rooftop photovoltaic solar and other renewable technology. In addition, stumbles at Ivanpah have provided the agencies and the industry with the experience for doing things better in the future, and a paper that thoroughly details these possibilities can be found here. In addition to wildlife impacts, solar energy can consume water resources, increase particulate matter in air, and have an unknown impact on soil carbon (sequestration of carbon in soil and rock.)  Yet even this article addresses the cobenefits that the BLM and companies such as BrightSource have learned:

• we can use degraded land and avoid pristine habitat
• we can co-locate energy with agriculture and other renewable technology
• we can carefully address siting with each individual project with thorough consideration given to local environmental, cultural, and social impacts

Dust winds at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

I am the person who picked up dead lizards, mice, or birds at Ivanpah. I am the person who dug up the tortoise burrows and removed them from their homes. I cried many mornings on my way to work. But I am also the person who, along with the men driving the bulldozers and road blades, stopped equipment to catch and remove lizards, mice, and rattlesnakes. And now, I am a person fighting to preserve the habitat not only in my backyard in the desert, but in rainforests and coral reefs as well, because climate change is insidious: it is often only with extreme events that we are able to take note of changes.

In a sense, I have broadened my backyard: it now includes Los Angeles, the Philippines, and Beijing. And it is only by protecting the environment and fighting climate change in these places that we can hope to preserve a future for the desert tortoise and the peregrine falcon in my desert home.

The views expressed here belong solely to the author of this entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.