Climate change studies at the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet

This summer, UAA master's degree student Sean Cahoon and UAA undergraduate student Brett Frazer (National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Fellow) are leading a summer-long research project adjacent to the melting Greenland Ice Sheet where they are studying climate change.

Western Greenland, a region undergoing rapid ice sheet melting, supports a large herd of migratory caribou and muskoxen that are essential in the area for subsistence hunting. A key mission of the project is to understand how climate warming and the presence of herbivores affect a host of plant and soil processes in one of the most rapidly changing regions of the Arctic.

The project is a new National Science Foundation (NSF)-International Polar Year (IPY) collaborative study between UAA Professor Jeffery Welker and Dr. P. Sullivan and Professors E. Post and D. Eissenstat from Pennsylvania State University (PSU). The team is using an experiment established by PSU in 2003, and this is one of the very few studies addressing how herbivore grazing intensity may control the response of tundra to climate warming.