The Polaris Project

I think this is a hellhole. It's a mucky, filthy stream. It's buggy, it's slow, disgusting. But I think it's an awesome place to do science.

So we've traveled about halfway around the world, flown now two red eyes to get to Moscow. We're going to leave Moscow later this morning, get on afternoon flight that will be another red eye to the city of Yakutsk. From Yakutsk, we'll wait another day and then get on another flight. Fly another four hours on a turboprop to get to Chersky. When we're done with that, we'll have flown 19 time zones and over 11,000 miles to get to where we're going.

The Polaris project is this field course in Siberia, but it's actually a lot more than that. The thought was to bring the students and professors to the Arctic to bring some new ideas, to increase the creativity and try to also hook them on Arctic research. They were all people that I could imagine being cooped up with for a month in a very remote location under very harsh conditions. They were fun people. They were people that were flexible, that could handle tough conditions and still keep a positive attitude. They were just a nice group of sharp scientists. The students bring different perspectives. They bring enthusiasm, they bring a level of idealism that some of the older scientists don't have. They refresh all of us. They're not afraid to ask what may seem like silly questions.

In Soviet times, this was a very rich region. Here was big seaport which received supplies for the whole gold mining. Region was very big. Here was ships, boats. After the Soviet Union collapsed, it all stopped. Town became like four times, five times smaller. There is much less population, no economy. Everything is out of profit in shareholders. It was easy to buy huge barges, not for a very high price. Exchange car for this barge. He had a car, I think jeep, and he exchanged jeep for the barge.

What is carbon? Carbon is everything around us. Carbon is trees, carbon is us. Carbon is our houses. Carbon is everything we put in our mouths to eat. It's a major part of our atmosphere. It makes it a major part of what our soils are. So central to the climate change issue is the emission of carbon to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas. We've known carbon dioxide as a heat trapping gas through 120 years of physics. And we've known that carbon has been accumulating in the atmosphere for about the last 60 years. Bacteria eat soil carbon the way that people eat food. Bacteria are now getting into the permafrost and exchanging that with the atmosphere. So they eat the soil carbon and they respire it. They emit CO2 the same way we emit CO2 when we take food, we eat carbon, and we then respire carbon dioxide out. Bacteria are doing the same thing. The thing that's potentially interesting in the Arctic is that the soil carbon that the bacteria are eating have been frozen for thousands to tens of thousands of years. So it's like the bacteria are sitting down to their breakfast. That breakfast has been in the freezer for the last 20,000 years. Once the ball starts rolling, once the atmosphere starts warming, it can continue to warm and warm and warm. This area of the dark tube we're working in, we might be a carbon bomb that's waiting to go off. All this carbon that is stored in the permafrost that is now thawing and now can move freely between the atmosphere and the biosphere. And as that starts to take place, we have the potential for having even accelerated warming that goes beyond what's coming out of people's tailpipes in terms of fossil fuel combustion. There's more carbon stored in the top few meters of the permafrost soil in this area of Russia than there is in the atmosphere already today. So it's a lot of soil carbon.

Epic moment.

Hell, yeah.

Okay, 1232, start. 210 milliliters a minute. I have to reconcile some of the. After we switch all those transects around, this is an exciting moment.

Finally.

Cool, man.

This is like my baby coming to life. I'm excited, but there's a lot riding on this. I mean, we've never done anything like this in this sort of stream, in this small of a stream. And I have no idea what to expect of whether or not this whole technique or procedure will work. And I really, really want it to.

In northern Siberia, there are gigatons of carbon that are buried beneath the earth. And those forms of carbon happen to be really big players for driving the different types of climate that we have. What's important for me to study how that carbon is released into the waterways of this region, whether it's the streams, the lakes, and then the rivers as they enter the ocean. And see where, when, and how that carbon gets transformed and changed into organic carbon to CO2 to methane, and where those types of carbon will come out and contribute to climate change.

If we will jump in the slope, it will quickly produce this sledge, and all this soil will move like lavinas. Do you understand?

Yes.

And you will quickly die. It Might be in five seconds. Therefore, don't keep your boots. It's something dangerous. Immediately move up like crocodile. Then you will build the bridge and will take your boots. Don't be modest. It's not so dangerous to be dirty. It's most important to be survivor. Do you understand?

Yes.

Let's go.

Nature hates us today because this stream is the hardest place we've ever had to work. This is crazy. Like, they look like little teeny fighter jets. There's, like swarming. You have like 50 on your gloves. It's insane. My hands just have a mixture of blood and de and bug gu.

Sometimes we suffer for our science.

I think one other kind of funny thing is you'll come back to the field and everyone will say, oh, how was the experiment? How was your day in the field? And you'll say, well, it was great, but I have no idea if it actually worked. We're kind of working with a lot of odds and ends. It's a very creative part of science. It's all sort of fluid, you know. And whoever said there wasn't creativity in science is totally wrong because we're pretty much problem solving every step of the way.

And there's a moment of discovery there that is really exciting, and they need to get that, and we need to make them see it doesn't matter how big or small it is. It seems this is new to science and that's exciting and that's worth celebrating. It's worth being proud of yourself when.

You do something like that.

And we all, we need to all appreciate those moments of discovery. That's one of the beauties of being a scientist.

But why does research in the Arctic matter with respect to the issue of climate change? We know why the Earth is warming. We're burning more and more fossil fuels and chopping down largely tropical forests now. And both those activities combined are putting more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And those greenhouse gases lead to a warming Earth. The way that the Arctic can be part of the solution is because it is the prime example of the impacts of global warming on the Earth. The reason we haven't already solved this problem of climate change, I believe, is that there's not enough understanding about the magnitude of the problem. And if the public at large understood the problem, the demand of their politicians to take action, regardless of the party, Republican, Democrat, whatever, they'd say, we've got a big problem, I've got kids, I've got grandkids, let's solve it.