On April 6th, Dr. Lauren Culler came to Proctor and talked about climate change. Dr. Culler works at the Institute of Arctic Studies and Environmental Studies, which are both at Dartmouth College. She’s a scientist who researched at the arctics.
Dr. Culler is from Maryland and worked at a lab in universities. They looked at the effects of urbanization on stream ecosystems. She was interested in the human impacts on the environment. She worked in the department of entomology, which is the study of insects. She and her friend collected insects in wetlands to study biodiversity. After she got her master’s degree, she moved to Dartmouth and became an arctic scientist since then.
Dr. Culler went through some background information on the arctics with us, such as, “the arctic is all the way at the top of the Earth, and so because of that, it’s really cold. It’s part of the cryosphere, and it contains an incredible amount of ice.” She emphasized on how cold the arctic is and then moved on to Polar Amplification, Positive Feedback, and Self-reinforcing. It’s a concern about the arctic because these cycles are “causing really rapid loss of ice, sea ice in particular.” When the ice sheet on the Arctic ocean starts melting, the darker coloration absorbs more energy from the Sun and will cause more melts. This positive feedback and self-reinforcing cycles are the major causes of the significant decrease of sea ice.
The dramatic loss of sea ice causes interdisciplinary problems. Arctic animals such as “polar bears, seals, and walruses, really rely on sea ice for their forging, for hunting. When the sea ice goes away, that could have pretty devastating impacts on animals that rely heavily on sea ice.”
Global warming will affect the entire ecosystem. The increase of temperature will directly influence ectotherms. Ectotherms are animals who don’t have the ability to regular their body temperature and the increase or change in the environment will affect these organisms. The climate change also affects the species growth rate and has a greater impact on many species because in some places it’s not cold enough to kill pests or not hot enough for some species to survive.
Greenland is mostly an ice sheet and not a lot of people live there. Dr. Culler showed a couple of pictures of her and her colleagues with some of her students on hills looking out at the ice sheets. They dug down into the soil beneath vegetation to see how far they can dig. They can only dig so far before they’ll hit the permafrost, which is frozen soil, “and it’s like you hit it and you can’t go any further down. It’s been frozen for a really long time and it sort of limits the amount of biological activity going on in this area. ”
Insects are great tools for observing climate change because they’re easy to collect and experiment. Dr. Culler showed us a picture of her friend with a ridiculous amount of arctic mosquitos on his back. I was surprised when I learned that mosquitos in the arctic are the most abundant animal. I never would’ve thought that mosquitos could survive in such cold environment and reproduce in freezing water. They could collect about 2000 mosquitos in around 8 hours. Dr. Culler said that the mosquitos are thriving because they lay eggs in the water but they don’t have many predators. However, it is very unexpected when they found that as the globe got warmer, some ponds started disappearing. Her idea is that “Greenland is a very dry tundra, so the permafrost doesn’t have very much water in it and it doesn’t get a lot precipitation. What we think is happening is that we get these really warm… which causes evaporation. It also causes an increase in evapotranspiration so plants are using more water.” Because the surrounding plants are absorbing more water, the water in the pond leaks through the cracks at the bottom of the pond and leaves the pond more quickly, causing the drying of the pond. 
Global warming and climate change has so many effects on the entire world, but more significantly on the arctic. Just a few degrees warmer could cause a series of changes and lead to many consequences that harm the animals and insects. There are many concerns caused by the general idea of “global warming.” I learned a lot about the series of problems that climate change could have on the arctics. If global warming could have so much influence on the arctics, which is only a small part of the entire Earth, it is obvious that it’s causing countless problems for the entire environment and the ecosystem. Although I never underestimated the impact of climate change, I learned more about many seemingly insignificant problems caused by global warming that could accumulate and cause a disaster.
Citation:
Lauren E. Culler
No comments:
Post a Comment