When people think of the Arctic, snow, ice and polar bears come to mind. Trees? Not so much. At least not yet.
A new NASA-led study using data from the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) shows that carbon in Alaska's North Slope tundra ecosystems spends about 13 percent less time locked in frozen soil than it did 40 years ago. In other words, the carbon cycle there is speeding up -- and is now at a pace more characteristic of a North American boreal forest than of the icy Arctic.
When people think of the Arctic, snow, ice and polar bears come to mind. Trees? Not so much. At least not yet.
A new NASA-led study using data from the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) shows that carbon in Alaska's North Slope tundra ecosystems spends about 13 percent less time locked in frozen soil than it did 40 years ago. In other words, the carbon cycle there is speeding up -- and is now at a pace more characteristic of a North American boreal forest than of the icy Arctic.
Changes observed in vegetation, permafrost, and coastal erosion at the Yukon's Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island Territorial Park between 1987 (left) and 2017 (right). Credit: Isla Myers-Smith/University of Edinburgh
"Warming temperatures mean that essentially we have one ecosystem -- the tundra -- developing some of the characteristics of a different ecosystem -- a boreal forest," said study co-author Anthony Bloom of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "While various factors regulate how fast this transformation will continue to occur, studies using Landsat and MODIS satellite imagery with field measurements over the past decades have observed a northward migration of shrubs and trees."
Read more at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - California Institute of Technology
Image: A 2017 image of Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island Territorial Park in the Yukon shows more vegetation, shrubs and water compared with the 1987 image of the same area. (Credit: Isla Myers-Smith/University of Edinburgh)
