Charting ‘Streams as Sensors’ of Climate Change with the Arctic RIOS Project
November 7, 2023
Haley Dunleavy
907-474-6407
The Arctic RIOS project team (from left to right), Arial Shogren, Jackson VerSteeg, Abigail Rec, Paden Allsup, Breck Bowden, Jay Zarnetske, Amelia Grose, Valeria Prieto, and Jansen Nipko, stand by the Toolik Field Station sign during their final field season in summer 2023.
Fly over Alaska’s Arctic tundra and you’ll see one ever-present feature: water. It inundates almost all areas of the environment. As in other biomes, all that water is essential to sustaining a functioning ecosystem.
But now, as climate change rapidly alters the Arctic, researchers at Toolik Field Station are diving in to study how the Arctic’s river networks can be used to understand what’s happening to the whole landscape. To do so, they’re revolutionizing the ways scientists study streams, using new approaches to data collection and analysis. Even more, they’re finding that these new methods can pinpoint, within the vast expanse of tundra, hotspots of change.
The National Science Foundation-funded project, Arctic RIOS, short for River Integrated Observations through Synoptic Sampling, is grounded in the idea that a river’s chemistry tells a story. That story isn’t just about the river itself, but also about the whole landscape surrounding that river.
With the Arctic becoming warmer and wetter, the landscape is getting “more leaky,” said , a hydro-ecologist at Michigan State University who started up the RIOS project in 2016. Those leaks eventually flow into stream networks, transporting dissolved chemicals. These chemicals can reveal processes happening on land, just by looking at concentrations within the rivers.
“We're trying to use the river network as a sort of distributed sensor network — to go out, see how different landscapes are leaking, what are they leaking and does that change through time,” Zarnetske said.
The RIOS group is particularly interested in what these leaks can tell us about carbon loss from climate-related change. Permafrost thaw, increased rain and wildfires all create new sources of carbon leaks and could contribute to global greenhouse gas levels, potentially acting as a significant driver of future warming. But when and where this carbon will be lost and how much is still uncertain.