Warming Up to a New Task

It is an unlikely hub, this Inupiat Eskimo village at the northernmost tip of Alaska, 330 miles above the Arctic Circle.

Wind-swept Barrow, where houses are anchored on pilings driven into the permafrost and polar bears roam its fringes, is unreachable by road. From the air, it seems almost a mirage, a small, defiant human imprint flanked on one side by endless pancake-flat tundra and on the other by the vast Chukchi Sea.

But twice a day, at least when the weather is not too severe, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 drops down to the lone airstrip. As the jet disgorges one carefully wrapped scientific instrument after another from the cargo hold, the Wiley Post-Will Rogers Memorial Airport takes on the air of a bazaar, one whose currency is scientific knowledge.

Inside the cramped, bustling terminal, experts coming and going hail one another and trade notes on their projects, which measure changing carbon levels, melting ice, rising temperatures and a host of other striking physical changes here.

Barrow, a onetime listening post during the Cold War, is now a crossroads for research on a warming planet. As scientists race to understand global warming, which they widely agree is due in part to human consumption of fossil fuels, the effects are most clearly discernible in the Earth’s polar regions.

“Basically, in terms of climate change, we’re getting it fastest and first,” said Richard Glenn, 42, a geologist and Inupiat leader.

Glenn, like many natives, straddles Barrow’s 1,000-year-old whaling-based culture and its modern oil-generated wealth: He is a vice president at the $1.3-billion-a-year Arctic Slope Regional Corp., which manages energy and other assets for native shareholders, but also works as a whaling captain two months of the year.

For Alaskans, warming is a fact on the ground and in the sea. They see it in things such as the sagging ground above the permafrost -- the frozen subsoil on which their homes and water pipes stand -- and the breakaway sea ice from which seal and bowhead whale hunters have sometimes had to radio for a rescue.

Average temperatures in Barrow are up 4 degrees over the last 50 years, and as much as 7 degrees in other parts of the Arctic, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. The average rise across the globe is 1.5 degrees.

“There’s no question something is going on,” says Warren Matumeak, 77, an Inupiat elder.

“Spring is coming earlier. We see birds up here we’ve never seen before. The Earth is changing around us, and we have to figure out how to adapt,” said Matumeak, a former land and wildlife manager for the North Slope Borough, the rough local equivalent of a county, albeit one slightly larger than Minnesota.

As the northern polar region warms, some climate models predict what is dryly called a “positive feedback loop,” which could start to warm the Earth much more quickly.

For Barrow, such a loop spells likely doom, a self-reinforcing cycle in which melting ice raises surface temperatures, which in turns melts more ice. That could cause severe coastal erosion and alter the delicate balance that sustains life on the tundra.

In a worst-case scenario, people would be forced to leave Barrow altogether, as residents of Shishmaref and Newtok, two smaller coastal villages in Alaska, have decided to do because of continuing erosion.

No one knows how the climate will change in the future, either globally or in Barrow. But with such obvious changes having taken place here and with the strong backing of the Inupiat-led government, Barrow has emerged in recent years as one of the most intensively monitored places in the world.

“Location, location, location -- I guess you could say we’re trying to capitalize on that,” said Glenn W. Sheehan, executive director of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium.

The consortium was created by local authorities 19 years ago to encourage climate research. Now largely funded by the National Science Foundation, it helps coordinate all facets for the burgeoning number of research projects -- including the hiring of guards who keep a lookout for polar bears.

Housed in a complex of huts and other rugged buildings that date to the U.S. military’s arrival in the 1940s, the consortium provides office space, laboratories, computers and a central meeting place for some of the most renowned climatologists in the world. Several federal agencies, including the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have offices here.

The experts do the field work outside -- in the Arctic Ocean, on barrier islands, along the coastal shelf and on the tundra, the treeless land that is a marshy, beige-green gathering place for a wide variety of migrating birds in the summer, and a quiet, desolate, snowy and frigid expanse in the dark winter.

As isolated as it is, Barrow, with its Post-Rogers airport (named for the American humorist and his pilot, who died in an air crash near here in 1935), qualifies as one of the more accessible places in the Arctic. The Alaska Airlines jets, which come from Fairbanks and are retrofitted to carry cargo in the forward half and people in the rear, brought in about 35,000 passengers last year.

Matumeak is old enough to remember when the only non-Inupiats here were the Presbyterian minister and his wife, a few schoolteachers and the U.S. military specialists who were monitoring their Soviet counterparts.

Although Inupiats are still the majority in the village of 4,500, there is a substantial minority of scientists, who come from around the world, as well as Filipino and Thai workers in the restaurant, hotel, taxi and rental-car businesses.

Once one of the more secluded villages on Earth, with a distinct dialect, Barrow has reaped mixed dividends from the oil in Alaska’s North Slope.

Oil money has helped usher in amenities such as well-heated homes, better medical services and satellite television. It also provides a generous transportation budget for the high school basketball team, the Whalers, whose flights to away games often cover more distance than a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

But other outside influences are unwelcome -- including drugs and crime, once all but nonexistent here. Elders worry about cultural changes, including less use of the local language and declining knowledge of how to survive off the land.

In some ways, Barrow, named for a 19th century British Admiralty official who never visited, is not long on aesthetic appeal. The downtown’s low-slung buildings, many built from prefabricated steel or concrete, are clearly designed to withstand savage weather, not win architecture awards.

Trash blows along the gravel roads, and large numbers of cars and trucks (brought in by barge in the summer) sit rusting atop flat tires. There are no trees.

Yet Barrow retains distinct tourist attractions. The region is a magnificent place to see polar bears, tundra swans, emperor geese and caribou as well as to experience Alaska’s fabled midnight sun. The sun rose May 10 and will sink below the horizon again Aug. 2.

Far fewer people come in the winter, when it’s brutally cold, and the sun does a weeks-long disappearing act, but the season does have its compensations, including the aurora borealis, or northern lights, which cast spectral waves of color across the dark sky.

And then, in any season, there’s the been-there appeal of Pepe’s North of the Border, the world’s northernmost Mexican restaurant. Opened during the oil boom of the late 1970s, it sells a book about its history, “Tacos on the Tundra,” along with its $18.50 enchilada plate.

But these days, by some measures, scientists outnumber the tourists. Last year, the consortium tracked about 8,000 researcher days (the combined number of days worked by all the scientists here) -- double the figure of a few years ago and a bit more than the number of tourist days.

The researcher figure is expected to rise to about 10,000 this year, representing the work of about 250 experts.

“We’ve sort of become a one-stop depot,” said Sheehan, 56, the director. “If you’re doing work related to climate change in the Arctic, you know you can get all the support you need, both logistical and technological, right here.”

Sheehan continued: “The cowboy in you says you want even more exotica” -- going to the North Pole, for instance -- “but the real scientist in you says, ‘Go to Barrow.’ ”

Kirstin Skadberg, 36, was on the airstrip the other day, loading supplies for a short helicopter trip to Cooper Island, about 20 miles away, where she had set up monitoring towers to measure carbon-dioxide fluctuations in the Arctic Ocean and the air above it, which her team hoped would yield clues to changes in climate patterns. Curious polar bears have twice brushed up against the towers, but caused no damage.

One of her flight companions was George Divoky, an ornithologist and research associate at the Institute for Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He has gained renown in climate-study circles for the 30 years he has spent tracking a colony of black guillemots on the barrier island.

Divoky, 59, whose lonely work is the subject of an upcoming book, did not set out to be a climatologist. But in the course of his observation, he has documented the rise and decline of the small Arctic birds, which look a bit like a cross between a penguin and a pigeon.

The seabirds have arrived an average of five days earlier each decade Divoky has studied them -- an indicator of the warmer climate here, which itself has big, and still not fully understood, implications for change in the polar food chain.

Skadberg, Divoky and their colleagues loaded their gear and food into a giant rope net, whose four corners were attached to a hook underneath the helicopter. The aircraft looked much like a giant stork when it took off in the bright sun.

There was so much weight that the pilots took that load and came back for the passengers. Divoky has spent entire summers on the island; Skadberg said she was likely to travel back and forth a few times, which would give her a chance to catch up with other scientists at places such as Pepe’s or the Niggivik cafeteria on the grounds of the consortium.

“Just being in the cafeteria, it’s kind of amazing who you run into,” said Skadberg, a doctoral student in ecology at San Diego State. “There’s a real sense of collaboration. Just today at lunch, I had a question about snow, and somebody said, ‘Well, there’s your snow guy, right over there.’ So I went over and talked to Matt.”

That would be Matthew Sturm, a 52-year-old Fairbanks-based geophysicist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. An expert on snow and ice melt, Sturm was making his ninth trip of the year to Barrow.

“Our job is to get hard facts as best as we can, so the guy in the street can understand it,” Sturm said.

“There’s no question that a whole bunch of things are changing in Alaska. We try to understand it rationally, but it also hits you on some other level if you live here. There’s really something going on in the neighborhood, is what it feels like.”

Sturm was one of about 60 scientists in the Barrow area one recent day, virtually all of whose efforts were assisted by the research consortium, which has a $3-million annual budget.

One of the many unanswered questions is whether the Arctic will continue to act as a net “carbon sink” for the Earth, absorbing carbon into its vast plains of tundra, lakes and bogs that are effectively freezer-locked much of the year and thus help to act as a sort of global air conditioner.

If, as many scientists project, the region’s ability to do so will be severely compromised by warming trends, the effects could be felt across the globe, including storm-surge flooding and erosion in some areas and, in others, devastating drought caused by heat-exacerbated evaporation.

Many scientists and world leaders have said there is an urgent need for international agreements to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, but others, including the Bush administration, have countered that more study is needed and that climate changes could prove self-correcting over the long term.

On a recent evening, with temperatures in the 50s, Craig Tweedie, a 33-year-old native of Australia, was making his way across the tundra, positioning instruments that could shed light on the carbon-sink issue.

Tweedie’s 150-acre research site is reachable via a very slow trek of a mile or so -- rubber wading boots mandatory -- on waffle-like plastic boards across the semi-liquid land. While the spot seems inordinately remote in human terms, a huge array of birds carries out a raucous conversation above.

At the site -- a latticework of boardwalks, sheds and instruments that in time will have a wireless Internet connection -- Tweedie’s team of scientists is studying the effects of varying water levels on the carbon-storage capacities of the tundra. It is doing so basically by draining one portion of the site by several inches and raising another by a similar amount.

“There are big potential tipping points for the tundra, and we’re hoping to understand a little bit more about those,” said Tweedie, a professor of biology and environmental science and engineering at the University of Texas, El Paso.

“There are a lot of cutting-edge people coming together in climate research, big people in the field. It’s very exciting to be here, actually.”

Sturm, the geophysicist at the cold-regions research lab, adds that the work seems to have taken on urgency and difficulty as policymakers -- a delegation of U.S. senators is due here next month for a briefing -- seek unambiguous answers about an uncertain climate.

“We each have a piece of the puzzle, but no one has it all,” Sturm said. “Our job is to figure it out.”