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John O'Brien is stalking some of the smallest animals in the world,
casting a wide net for tiny plankton in Arctic lakes.
This is a plankton net. It has fine holes and will strain the water.
and in the water are little zoo plankton, which you'll see in a minute.
He and other scientists working in this remote region of northern Alaska
are tracking ecological changes above the Arctic Circle.
The Toolik Field Station on the North Slope of Alaska
is one of only 26 Long-Term Ecological Research stations in the United States.
And, it is the only one studying Arctic ecosystems.
We are looking for Daphnia middendorffiana that has eggs.
Capturing plankton from lakes, conducting experiments
on the heath and tussock tundra, and pit-tagging Arctic graylings.
So to be nice to this guy while I am doing all of this its fish sleepy juice
So then what I'm gonna do is just slide this 1B7a3E
This fragile, isolated research zone rests near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
one of the world's most remote patches of wilderness.
I think the scientific and ecological values, the value of the place as a museum
of natural processes. That has increased in importance
The Arctic provides an important global atmospheric service as a storage
bin for carbon, nitrogen, methane and other heat-trapping gases that lead
to a warmer planet. Those greenhouse gases are already at alarmingly high
levels in the atmosphere from cars, industry and dirty power plants.
We need to limit our effect on the natural world. And this is a good place
to do it. It's the last great wilderness we have remaining.
Some of the key research questions at Toolik Lake focus on how the
environment at the top of the world will cope with global warming and melting.
And how plants and animals adapt to an extreme environment,
where there are six months of low or no light,
and temperatures drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius in the winter.
Fish by fish, plant by plant, leaf by leaf, it is exacting, laborious work.
We're seeing how dense the soil samples are. It's not the most exciting
job right now, drying off soil bags and weighing them.
The Stream Team spends their day in hip waders.
She'll take samples upstream for the macro-invertebrate community and
downstream. Then I put litter bags here because we can't do Serber samples here to collect the macro-invertebrae.
Climate change is an important part of our research because in the Arctic we
see changes at a much faster rate
than in other parts of the world.