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Beaver Ponds May Exacerbate Warming In Arctic, Scientists Say
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The stream through western Alaska never looked like this before. In aerial photography from the 1980s, it wove cleanly through the tundra, thin as thread. Today, in satellite images, it appears as a string of black patches: one large pond after ...
Global heating has driven the shrubification of the Arctic tundra; the harsh winter is shorter, and there is more free-running water in the coldest months. The animals are participants in a feedback loop: climate change opens the landscape to beavers, whose ponds drive further warming, which attracts even more paddle-tailed comrades. Armed with high-resolution satellite imagery, Tape and his colleagues located beaver ponds in the lower Noatak River basin area of north-western Alaska.
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