Long-term records track climate change effects on 蜜桃影像鈥檚 North Slope

a person drills into lake ice with an auger
Photo by Amanda Young/Toolik Field Station
Toolik Field Station staff member Mayra Melendez Gonzalez drills into the ice on Toolik Lake to measure its thickness for long-term records in June 2022.

For 15 years, staff at the University of 蜜桃影像 Fairbanks Toolik Field Station, located north of the Brooks Range, have kept a close eye on the tundra鈥檚 daily activity. They record everything from lake ice thickness and precipitation to the date when each year鈥檚 first blueberry ripens. It鈥檚 a practice that鈥檚 left Amanda Young, a co-principal investigator for Toolik, questioning what 鈥渘ormal鈥 means in a rapidly changing Arctic, especially when temperatures unseasonably rose above freezing earlier this month.
 
These consistent records of daily to weekly environmental variation may seem mundane, but, together, they tell a story about the changing tundra that large-scale models and one-time sampling campaigns miss. By having this long-term record of change, Young said in a poster she鈥檚 presenting at the American Geophysical Union鈥檚 2022 fall meeting, 鈥渧isiting researchers can get a better idea of where their shorter-term projects fall into the larger picture and avoid misinterpreting their findings.鈥
 
Often, the data will show connections between seemingly disparate variables, said Young. For example, an abnormally large snowstorm in May 2015 might be the reason savannah sparrow and Lapland longspur populations noticeably dropped in 2016.
 
Young said the biggest trend occurred in deep permafrost soils, where temperatures are warming, a concerning early indicator of permafrost thaw.
 
鈥淭hese are the things people have been measuring for ages,鈥 Young said. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e useful for science because they show how the plants, animals, microbes and everything else are responding in the landscape. But these parameters also influence how we live on the landscape.鈥
 
These datasets are available to access and explore via the Toolik website.