George Divoky's Planet

[XemaSab]

This is a story about global warming and a scientist named George Divoky, who studies a colony of Arctic seabirds on a remote barrier island off the northern coast of Alaska. I mention all this at the start because a reader might like to come to the point, and what could be more urgent than the very health and durability of this planet we call Earth? However, before George can pursue his inquiry into worldwide climate change; before he can puzzle out the connections between a bunch of penguinesque birds on a flat, snow-covered, icebound island and the escalating threat of droughts, floods and rising global temperatures, he must first mount a defense -- his only defense in this frozen, godforsaken place -- against the possibility of being consumed, down to the last toenail, by a polar bear while he sleeps. He must first build a fence.

Cooper Island, June 4, 2 o'clock in the morning. The sky is a cold slab of gray, the air temperature hovers in the upper 20's and the wind -- always the wind -- howls across hundreds of miles of sea ice with such unremitting force that George has disappeared beneath a hat, two hoods and a thick fleece face mask covering all but his bespectacled eyes. Standing near the three small dome tents that make up his field camp on Cooper, George raises a pair of binoculars and begins to scan for bears. Past the island's north beach, a wind-scarred plain of sea ice stretches uninterrupted to the pole. To the south, the nearest tree stands 200 miles away on the far side of the Brooks Range. Here, some 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle, with the sun making a constant parabolic journey around the sky, George surveys a view that replicates in all directions: the snow-covered island merges with the sea ice at its shores, the dazzling sheets of sea ice stretch to meet a pale gray dome of sky. Surrounded by a vast, undulating whiteness, he appears to be standing in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. He appears to be standing on the tops of cirrus clouds.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05EFDE1430F935A35752C0A9649C8B63


(This is an oldie but goodie about an arctic researcher. It's long, but worth the read.)

[XemaSab]

1. (And since I didn't use up my 4-paragraph quota on the OP)

Among his colleagues in Barrow, George is a local hero for the tenacity he has shown out on Cooper Island. And his graph displaying the advancement of egg-laying among his colony of guillemots has been given a special place of honor on the wall of the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory in Barrow, next to the graphs of several multimillion-dollar government studies. But aside from completing his dissertation in 1998 and having an article accepted by the academic journal Arctic, he hasn't published his results or sought a wider audience. And when I ask him why that is, he looks down, he removes and cleans his glasses with his shirt, and when he looks up again, he speaks in a slow, deliberate voice. ''It makes me feel really bad that I haven't gotten this out earlier,'' he begins. ''And so it's hard for me to talk about. I think that whatever characteristics cause people to do long-term studies are somehow linked to their not wanting or needing to be published. But I don't want to make excuses. I'm 55. My father died when he was 54. I don't want to say that I outlived my dad and then fritter away the next 20 years. Or die and have someone say of me, 'He had a data set that could have really added to the debate.' Now,'' he goes on, ''there's almost an obligation. Especially with George Bush in office, and people saying, 'Is climate change real?' You still get these people who say, 'Do you really think it's happening?' and I'm, like, 'What is it you don't understand?!' It needs to get out, and it needs to get out soon. People say that it's happening naturally, and why should we worry? But the world may not have the stability we think it has. This,'' he says, gesturing around the island, ''is evidence that stasis isn't operating.''

[hatrack]

2. I remember printing this out for myself - it's a great article!

This is how science works - it's often slow and painful and painstaking work.

As Oppenheimer said, "Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful."

[phantom power]

3. Great story about doing field research.

Well, it's a great story in several ways.