WEEK 26: ARKANSAS
Rice and Ice: the Wetlands of Arkansas and the Arctic
By Dr. Benjamin R. K. Runkle, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas
The Arctic cools the earth, controlling weather patterns far beyond its borders through its chilly winds and reflective snow and ice cover. The Arctic is also a safe haven for many fascinating and charismatic animals. Polar bears, musk ox, walrus, and reindeer all hark from the great north. Additionally, many birds fly north in the summer to find refuge in the cool, wet climates of the vast Arctic landscape. The Arctic is also home to unique peoples and cultural traditions — people who have learned to live in conditions many of us would find harsh and challenging. We all have a stake in protecting the Arctic — even those of us in Arkansas.
I write as a scientific researcher and educator from our state’s premier institute of higher education, the University of Arkansas. My research focuses on how Arctic wetlands preserve organic matter. Organic matter is the remains and waste products of animals, plants, and other organisms left in the environment after initial decomposition. This means organic matter is resistant to decomposition under those specific environmental conditions. I aim to quantify how quickly this organic matter may be converted to carbon dioxide as these regions warm. These are great ecological questions; they are also great to study because they bring me into contact with landscapes very different from ours.
Prior to arriving in Arkansas, I worked as a scientist at the University of Hamburg in Germany and performed month-long visits to Siberia’s Lena River Delta. This extraordinary landscape is filled with wetlands on the islands between channels of the Delta. One of these islands is home to a long-standing research station supported by both the Russian and German governments; similar stations exist around the Arctic as prime examples of international cooperation and collaboration.
The river re-arranges the Delta, the winds re-arrange the island banks, and the landscape keeps carbon in its soils rather than let it circulate in the atmosphere. These behaviors act on different scales of time and space — some are local processes that occur over a long time, some are wide-reaching but quite quick.
Arctic landscapes demonstrate that nature is borderless with its vast reach of ecological and climate processes.
One example of the latter — in both 2013 and 2014, I stayed on the research station during the annual spring flood of the Lena River. Because this river flows from a warmer south to a colder north, the flood advances northward as more snow and ice melts, so the river can rise over twenty feet in twenty four hours. The icebergs left behind on the banks are extraordinary; despite the damage they made to our measurements sites.
The astonishing conditions of the major flood of 2014 were somewhat scary on the ground, as we watched the water rise onto our relatively small island’s banks. However, the flood also provided a great research opportunity. This big event delivers lots of fresh water and ice into the Laptev Sea and Arctic Ocean. Seeing this happen in person generates new research ideas and a new, tangible understanding of the geographic setting.
The flood carries dissolved organic matter — small pieces of carbon derived from decomposed plant and organic material. Since the water that creates this flood comes from snow that has melted atop the soil surface, it carries organic material from that soil all the way to the river’s northern mouth. Even in the first week of measurements during the flood period, we saw the concentrations of carbon in the river water more than double before the peak flood even arrived. The excitement of the ability to discover new facts about the flood, alongside the immense beauty of the water and its ice bergs, more than made up for the challenges of cold weather and damage to our instruments.
My research experience in the Lena River Delta’s wetlands is something I draw upon as I turn to new research directions in Arkansas. Arkansas has its own Delta where the St. Francis, the White, and the Arkansas rivers empty into the Mississippi from the west. Our state is home to more than 50% of the rice paddies in the U.S.A. Anyone who has driven through the Delta region of the state has seen the curvy levees supporting water and covered with the bright green rice crop.
Like so much of the Arctic, the rice fields are wetlands –and wetlands have certain similar characteristics no matter where they are on our earth. Their swampy conditions slow down the decomposition of organic matter, so both regions offer potential storage areas for pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. These conditions are also friendly to plants like rice (in Arkansas) and special sedges (in the Arctic) that have developed a soft spongy tissue allowing them to bring oxygen from the air down to their roots. Because of these similarities, many of the lessons we learn in the Arctic can be applied to better understanding the rice plants grown in Arkansas, and vice-versa. The importance of both landscapes is great. The thawing Arctic risks releasing much of its stored soil carbon back in to the atmosphere; meanwhile the rice paddies feed much of the world. As a researcher, I strive to better understand these landscapes, so we can we control and predict the outcomes of the changing climate to create a safer future — for both Arkansas AND for the Arctic.
About the Author: Assistant Professor Dr. Benjamin R. K. Runkle researches carbon and water cycles in wetland environments at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering. He has executed scientific research world-wide and was even a Fulbright scholar in Mauritius. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of California — Berkeley in Civil & Environmental Engineering and received his B.S. at Princeton University also in Civil & Environmental Engineering. Follow him on twitter here @DrBenRunkle.
