midnight Sun Golf Course in Fairbanks, Alaska, it is said that you never get the same shot twice. That’s because the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet, and as the subterranean permafrost melts, it distorts the pitches of the ball. This rapid thawing process releases ancient organic matter—lots of it. (The world’s permafrost contains twice as much carbon as is present in the atmosphere.) Bacteria feed on that released matter and release plumes of gas. methane, a gas that is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. And as permafrost melts release more methane, it increases global temperatures—making more ice melt, releasing more methane. That’s the dreaded climate feedback loop, and scientists are using a range of technologies to better understand it.
“We know the future of the Arctic is all about warming,” said Tyler R. Jones, a geochemist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “In preparation, we wanted to better understand permafrost environments—to model them better. We want to know what could happen.”
The Fairway just happened to be the perfect spot for scientists to land their specially designed drones. The plane carries greenhouse gas samplers, has a wingspan of 10 feet. But it lacked wheels so the team had to land on their stomachs. “You can just do loops around an object of interest and get a profile of the methane flow,” says Jones. “The golfers let us play for a minute and landed our drones. And then they make their shots.
Nearby lurks a site of particular interest—or scary, depending on how you look at it. Big Trail Lake is the product of a fierce battle thermoelectric event, in which the permafrost melts so rapidly that the ground collapses. The resulting craters, filled with water, are ideal conditions for the bacteria to produce methane. Indeed, Big Trail Lake may be one of the highest-emitting lakes in Alaska, so the team collected methane data from a floating instrument tower there. Nicholas Hasson, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said: “This is probably one of the most complex scientific experiments to take place in the Arctic, given the variety of instruments. “We’re like methane detectives.”
