In the middle of the night At Sun Golf Course in Fairbanks, Alaska, it’s said that no two shots are the same. This is because the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet, and the course’s fairways are deformed as the underground permafrost thaws. This fast thawing releases ancient organic matter. (The world’s permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere today.) Microbes feed on the released material, a gas that warms the planet 80 times more than carbon dioxide. Exhales a plume of methane. Also, more methane is released from thawing permafrost, causing global temperatures to rise, causing more permafrost to thaw, releasing more methane. This is a terrifying climate feedback loop, and scientists are using different techniques to better understand it.
Geochemist Tyler R. Jones of the University of Colorado Boulder said: “In preparation, we want to better understand and model the permafrost environment better. We want to see what is possible.”
Fairways are the perfect place for scientists to land specially designed drones. An aircraft with equipment for sampling greenhouse gases has a wingspan of 10 feet. However, due to the lack of wheels, the team must belly land. “You can get a profile of the methane plume by just looping around the feature of interest,” Jones says. “The golfer had us play him for a minute, land the drone, and they hit the shot.”
There are particularly interesting or terrifying places lurking nearby, depending on how you look at them. Big Trail Lake is the product of a violent thermokarst event, when the permafrost melted rapidly and the ground collapsed. The resulting water-filled crater represents ideal conditions for microbial production of methane. In fact, Big Trail Lake may be one of Alaska’s most emitting lakes, so the team collects methane data from an instrument tower floating there. “This is probably one of the most sophisticated scientific experiments taking place in the Arctic,” says Nicholas Hasson, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. increase. “We are like methane detectives.”
