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''' ALASKA SO ALARMS '''
IN JULY LAST, The Wood Hole scientists, along with 13 undergraduate and graduate students working on projects of their own, set up a-
Temporary field station on a nameless lake 60 miles northwest Bethel, with a population of 6,000 is the largest town in the region.
They drilled permafrost cores with a power auger, took other sediment and water samples and embedded temperature probes in the frozen ground.
Later, back in the lab at Woods Hole , they began the process of analyzing the samples carbon-content and nutrients.
THE ARCTIC IS WARMING abut twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in the sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high.
Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing : higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages.
But to the scientists from Woods Hole Research Center who have come here to study the effects of climate change. the most urgent is fate of permafrost. the always frozen ground that underlies much of the state.
Starting just a few feet below the surface and extending tens or even hundreds of feet down, it contains vast amounts of carbon in organic matter plants that took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago, died and froze before they could decompose.
Worldwide, permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.
ONCE this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming.
Scientists have estimated that the process of permafrost thawing could contribute as much as 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit to global warming over the next several centuries, independent of what society does does to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and other activities.
IN ALASKA, nowhere is permafrost more vulnerable than here, 35- miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a vast, largely treeless landscape formed from sediment brought down by two of the state's biggest rivers. the Yukon and Kuskokwim,
Temperatures three feet down into the frozen ground are less than half a degree below freezing. This area could lose much of its permafrost by midcentury.
That, said Max Holmes, senior scientist and deputy director of the research center, "has all kinds of consequences both locally for this region. for the animals and the people who live here. as well as globally.''
''It's sobering to think of this magnificent landscape and how fundamentally Alaska, it can change over a relatively short time period,'' he added.
But on this wide, flat tundra, it takes a practiced eye to see Alaska is thawing from below.
At one of the countless small lakes that pepper the region. chunks of shoreline that include what had been permafrost have calved off towards the water.
NEARLY, across a spongy bed of mosses and lichens, a small boggy depression most likely formed when the ice on the top layers of the permafrost below it melted to water.
IN July, the Woods Hole scientists along with 13 undergraduate and graduate students working on projects of their own, set up a temporary field station on a nameless lake 60 miles northwest of Bethel, which with a population of 6,000 is the largest town in the region.
They drilled permafrost cores with a power auger, took other sediment and water samples and embedded temperature probes in the frozen ground.
Later, back in the lab at Woods Hole, they began the process of analyzing the samples for carbon content and nutrients.
The goal is to better understand how thawing permafrost affects the landscape and, ultimately, how much and what mix of greenhouse gasses is released.
''In order to know how much is lost, you have to know how much is there,'' said Sue Natali, a Wood Hole scientist and permafrost expert.
Even in colder northern Alaska, where permafrost in some parts of North Slope extends more than 2,100 feet below the surface, scientists are seeing stark changes.
Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said the temperature at a dept of 65 feet have risen by 3 degrees celsius [about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit] over decades.
The rise in emissions has been so significant that Alaska may be shifting froma storehouse of carbon to a net source.
The Honor and Serving of the latest ''Operational Research'' on Global Warming continues.
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