Woods Hole Research Center

The Challenge

The time has come now to rebuild scientific and public support for the ideals behind the UNFCCC treaty, and for the treaty itself. The Woods Hole Research Center believes that understanding the rapid changes now underway in the Arctic needs to be a critical part of this process, and we are well positioned to engage in the action needed to help sustain our planet.

Why We’re the Best to Meet the Challenge
And how we propose to do it

WHRC has a comprehensive worldwide program of research and public affairs dealing with the biological causes and effects of climate change, using the most contemporary scientific tools. We are particularly well poised to address the arctic carbon bomb issue because:

• WHRC has a well-established record of studies and publications spanning the Arctic.
• WHRC has deployed state-of-the-art instrumentation, using measurements related to the presence of frozen or liquid water in the soil, to study permafrost thaw.
• WHRC has a major ongoing project of research and monitoring of river water chemistry in most of the major rivers across Russia, western Canada, and Alaska, which empty into the Arctic Ocean. The measurements of carbon in the river water yields rich information about the sources and ages of carbon being mobilized from the land as a result of climate change and management.
• WHRC is among the key leaders and organizers of a new multi-agency, multi-disciplinary, and multi-investigator project being planned to focus on the arctic ecosystems of Alaska and northwestern Canada.
• WHRC is the main US group conducting research with Russian collaborators at a unique research facility in the Kolyma River watershed in eastern Siberia, where we have begun studying how very deep and carbon-rich permafrost soils are rapidly thawing.
• In order to train the next generation of climate change scientists, WHRC has established an educational program that brings US undergraduate students to the study sites in Russia every summer. This also yields material for communication and outreach efforts suitable at the college level and for the general public.

Specifically, we propose key research to narrow gaps in our understanding of arctic ecosystems, on the feedback of changes over large areas, to either exacerbating or mitigating additional warming.

We have two excellent methodologies for studying changes at large scales – satellite images that span the Arctic and river chemistry measurements that integrate the effects of changing climate and management throughout upstream basins. Combining these approaches, we will integrate understanding of changes in measured river water chemistry with related changes in land surface properties of their watersheds detected from space by satellite images, yielding a powerful pan-tropical assessment of the drivers and impacts of change.