For the last several years, Tyler Williams has been living in the Arctic Circle for months at a time to learn about the local impacts of rising temperatures and sea levels.
“So, I was in the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta in coastal Alaska," he said. "And we were specifically in Old Chevak, Alaska. Old Chevak, Alaska used to be where current Chevak resides. However, they were facing low elevation and coastal flooding threats, so then they had to move upland. And now Old Chevak is where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife will host bird camps, as well as communicate the ecological importance of the area to any locals, as well as just emphasize the work that they do for the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta."
Williams is a recent Utah State University graduate with a master's degree in ecology. He's spent his last three summers in the Arctic, where just getting to his field site is a journey of big flights, small flights, and 60 to 70 river miles to a remote camp without running water — but full of mosquitos.
“The mosquitoes themselves, I would say, could carry a baby away,” Williams said.
Williams was there because he wanted to know how climate change might alter Arctic wetlands. So, he built a mesocosm experiment where he cut intact blocks of plants and soil out of the ground, placed them into plastic tubs, sank those tubs back into the tundra, and manipulated the conditions.
All told, he tested warming, flooding, and simulated goose herbivory. Then he measured how the plants changed, and how much carbon dioxide and methane came out of those experimental wetland plots.
Williams found that although both warming and flooding increased CO2 release from the system, warming alone did not increase methane release — but flooding did.
“It increased our methane emissions by about 800 to 1000 times,” he said.
This is alarming because, as a greenhouse gas, methane traps over 80 times more heat than CO2. However, this does not mean the whole Arctic is suddenly releasing a thousand times more methane. These were small experimental plots, and the emissions started from a very low baseline. But the results show how sensitive Arctic wetlands can be when they stay flooded. And in a world of rising sea levels, that is extremely significant.
