Rose Cory’s looks at the fate of carbon contained in permafrost. Jason Dobkowski describes a permafrost slump at Wolverine Lake
A needle on lab equipment wavers as the machine tracks precise changes in carbon dioxide concentrations in a sample. Water flows through tubes. In every droplet of water there might be a million microbes swimming, feeding. It’s a zoo in there. University of Michigan researchers Dr. Collin Ward, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth […]
April 28 2015— The ice of Alaska’s waterways breaks up violently with spring thaw. A rush of brown dark water forges downstream. The color stain shows the presence of decaying plant and soil matter dissolved in the water called organic carbon. When it interacts with bacteria or sunlight, dissolved organic carbon can be converted into […]
“We are interested in studying what happens to this material as it makes its way to the ocean… The transformations that it undergoes.” Jason Dobkowski, lab manager in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, explained his work as he crouched on treacherous muddy ground to collect water at a […]
At the turn of the season as snow and ice melt, Alaska’s waterways open up. “This is the highest this river will be this season,” Jason Dobkowski said. “Here is this giant flush of particulate and nutrients that flow through the river. So we are trying to make sure we sample at this big flush […]
Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists – Jason Dobkowski stands on the shores of Wolverine Lake. His research site is located in the North Slope of Alaska, nestled near the remote foothills of the Brooks Range. “I’m here studying permafrost thaw slump which is depositing silt and material into the lake behind me. And that material, […]
Geologic methane is seeping through the edges of thawing permafrost and receding glaciers in Alaska and Greenland, according to a study recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience. University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Katey Walter Anthony led the study, which, for the first time, documents the widespread occurrence of these terrestrial sources of geologic methane […]