Excerpt
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now the second of two field reports from Alaska on the impact of climate change and warmer temperatures.
Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports from the 49th state on how those changes are affecting greenhouse gas levels and the consequences for the local ecosystem.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): To get to the root of global warming in the Arctic, scientists need to pull out some serious tools.
WOMAN: On three. Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
MILES O’BRIEN: But that doesn’t mean they have to take themselves too seriously.
Near Alaska’s Toolik Field Station, caught up with a pair of researchers on a backbreaking mission to drill cores in soil frozen hard as concrete.
MEGAN MACHMULLER, Colorado State University: It’s hard work, especially hard to pull up frozen soil.
It’s something that we’re very passionate about because, you know, it’s so critical to understand the functions that are beneath our feet. And so that motivates us, and we have fun while we’re doing it.
WOMAN: You think about here? OK. Here we go.
MILES O’BRIEN: Megan Machmuller is a postdoctoral fellow and Laurel Lynch a grad student at Colorado State University. They’re part of a team trying to understand how and when the huge store of carbon, methane and other greenhouse gases permanently frozen in the Arctic tundra might be released into the atmosphere.
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