Beaver Ponds May Exacerbate Warming In Arctic, Scientists Say (theguardian.com) 95
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 another, dozens of meters apart. It's a transformation that is happening across the Arctic, the result of landscape engineering on an impressive scale. But this is no human endeavor to reshape the world. It is the work of the North American beaver, and there is no sign of it stopping. Were the waddling rodents making minor inroads, researchers may never have noticed. But the animals are pouring in, pushing north into new territories. The total number of animals is far from clear, but the ponds they create are hard to miss: in the Arctic tundra of Alaska alone, the number of beaver ponds on streams have doubled to at least 12,000 in the past 20 years. More lodges are dotted along lakes and river banks.
The preponderance of beavers, which can weigh as much as 45kg, follows a collapse in trapping and the warming of a landscape that once proved too bleak for occupation. 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. Instead of felling trees for their dams, the beavers construct them from surrounding shrubs, creating deep ponds in which to build their lodges. The new arrivals cause plenty of disruption. For some communities, the rivers and streams are the roads of the landscape, and the dams make effective roadblocks. As the structures multiply, more land is flooded and there can be less fresh water for drinking downstream. But there are other, less visible effects too. 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. Physics suggested this would happen. Beaver ponds are new bodies of water that cover bare permafrost. Because the water is warm -- relatively speaking -- it thaws the hard ground, which duly releases methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
Scientists now have evidence this is happening. Armed with high-resolution satellite imagery, Tape and his colleagues located beaver ponds in the lower Noatak River basin area of north-western Alaska. They then analyzed infrared images captured by Nasa planes flying over the region. Overlaying the two revealed a clear link between beaver ponds and methane hotspots that extended for tens of meters around the ponds. "The transformation of these streams is a positive feedback that is accelerating the effects of climate change, and that is what's concerning," says Tape. "They are accelerating it at every one of these points." Because the Nasa images give only a snapshot in time, the researchers will head out next year to measure methane on the ground. With more measurements, they hope to understand how the emissions vary with the age of beaver ponds: do ponds release a steady flow of methane, or does the release wane after a decade or two? "What's happening here is happening on a huge scale," says Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who is tracking the influx of beavers into the sparse northern landscape. "Our modeling work, which is in progress right now, shows that this entire area, the north slope of Alaska, will be colonized by beavers by 2100."
The preponderance of beavers, which can weigh as much as 45kg, follows a collapse in trapping and the warming of a landscape that once proved too bleak for occupation. 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. Instead of felling trees for their dams, the beavers construct them from surrounding shrubs, creating deep ponds in which to build their lodges. The new arrivals cause plenty of disruption. For some communities, the rivers and streams are the roads of the landscape, and the dams make effective roadblocks. As the structures multiply, more land is flooded and there can be less fresh water for drinking downstream. But there are other, less visible effects too. 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. Physics suggested this would happen. Beaver ponds are new bodies of water that cover bare permafrost. Because the water is warm -- relatively speaking -- it thaws the hard ground, which duly releases methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
Scientists now have evidence this is happening. Armed with high-resolution satellite imagery, Tape and his colleagues located beaver ponds in the lower Noatak River basin area of north-western Alaska. They then analyzed infrared images captured by Nasa planes flying over the region. Overlaying the two revealed a clear link between beaver ponds and methane hotspots that extended for tens of meters around the ponds. "The transformation of these streams is a positive feedback that is accelerating the effects of climate change, and that is what's concerning," says Tape. "They are accelerating it at every one of these points." Because the Nasa images give only a snapshot in time, the researchers will head out next year to measure methane on the ground. With more measurements, they hope to understand how the emissions vary with the age of beaver ponds: do ponds release a steady flow of methane, or does the release wane after a decade or two? "What's happening here is happening on a huge scale," says Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who is tracking the influx of beavers into the sparse northern landscape. "Our modeling work, which is in progress right now, shows that this entire area, the north slope of Alaska, will be colonized by beavers by 2100."
Now the deniers have something to blame! (Score:3)
Re:Now the deniers have something to blame! (Score:5, Funny)
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I have always loved beavers.
Betty has a.... (Score:2)
big brown beaver, what's NOT to love
How do I balance the good that beavers do slowing the runoff of water and saving it to aquifers [beaversolutions.com] with this apparent collaboration of the oil industry and people who like to blow up beaver dams?
Cool story bro, imo it is far more likely that the beavers are taking advantage of newly exposed streams, due to global warming, than actually causing it themselves, while the release of sub-surface methane is just inevitable... beavers or no
At the very least the beaver dams should r
Brenda's beaver needs... (Score:2)
a barber https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Beavers are back on the menu, boys.
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Those... (Score:2)
Those big toothed, hairy bastards! They shouldn't be in jail, they should be under the jail!
What I'm getting from this (Score:2)
Is that Canada needs to import some more French trappers.
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Science is violence, amirite? Remember how Descartes kicked a pregnant dog because science proved animals don't feel and the whimpers were just the "rattling of gears"?
This always puzzled me. Why overlay a conscious mind, then, atop such gearing, adding terror and pain and so on? If the conscious mind is not part of that system, why add (or create!) the experience of pain for it?
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Is that Canada needs to import some more French trappers.
That's probably not going to help the situation in Alaska, though.
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Why cherry-pick your religion, ignoring Jainism, Buddhism, and other non-creator-god traditions?
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Jainism and Buddhism sprung from Brahmanical culture, where all of reality will be wiped out when Brahma awakens, they just seek to allow humans to rise beyond this plane before it happens
Why do Westerners try and paint up other cultures as some happy go lucky concern, when they are all bound to the same base human nature?
History repeats? (Score:2)
The same thing must have happened during the glacial retreat starting 18,000 years ago. It's a bit surprising that the beavers are going north before the trees get there. But then rodents do get everywhere.
Early warning failure (Score:3)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
That movie looks AWESOME. And the tagline is fantastic: "They'll dam you to hell!"
If I may make a modest proposal... (Score:2)
Looks like beaver is back on the menu, boys!
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Yea, pretty much this. If we didn't regularly kill off massive amounts of deer, they'd also eventually cause an ecological disaster. The beavers were only protected because we nearly hunted them to extinction like the buffalo... but there has to be a balance.
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Deer overpopulate because humans don't like other predators around, just look at all the nonsense that humans are causing when coyotes show up [youtube.com]
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Deer overpopulate because humans don't like other predators around, just look at all the nonsense that humans are causing when coyotes show up [youtube.com]
At least beavers are sometimes eaten by some protected predators, like the bald eagle, along with other eagles and hawks.
May... (Score:1)
New Generation Lingo? (Score:1)
So is a beaver pond just another name for a whore house?
So now we have to shoot Winona's Big Brown Beaver?
I'm confused.
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So is a beaver pond just another name for a whore house?
You'll have to ask your Snapper dealer...
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He is busy eating clams.
Here Come the Boas (Score:5, Funny)
It cannot be but just a short matter of time before the exploding boa population in FL extends to the tundra of Alaska. Thus, correcting this insidious imbalance and returning the world to perfect harmony.
Re: Here Come the Boas (Score:2)
Something about apes freezing to death?
And remember... (Score:3, Insightful)
Beavers ponds are entirely non-anthropogenic... They own this via natural evolution & adaptation. Who are we as Hominids to judge their right to impact climate in this way?
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That's bullshit. They evolved alongside native human populations in the same territory. Humans who used to live in societies that were intrinsically linked to nature, and worked to keep it in balance. Removing our impact on them entirely is no more natural of a state for these ecosystems than if we were to have exterminated them instead.
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They evolved alongside native human populations in the same territory. Humans who used to live in societies that were intrinsically linked to nature, and worked to keep it in balance.
Citation please, disputing the Beaver's 7+ million year old fossil record in North America vs. the less than 27,000 year fossil record for human habitation of North America, with appropriate discussion of glaciation during this period, and the estimated evolutionary rate of change in large rodent populations.
Also... You fail at sarcasm.
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Before the humans, there were more wolves. Bigger wolves. That's also in the fossil record.
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Before the humans, there were more wolves. Bigger wolves. That's also in the fossil record.
Wolves are also non-anthropogenic. You're missing a point on complexity and assuming there's some kind of stable optimum that can be maintained. The periodic, even routine, ice ages imply there is not, and the forcing mechanisms for them are completely uncontrollable. (hint: cosmic rays from spiral arms) The Geologic record since the Archean doesn't hold a lot of clues to heat crisis derived extinctions, there are a few, mostly related to volcanic events such as the Permian-Triassic "great dying" event.
Origin story (Score:2)
The rain was coming down hard, beating against the window like a thousand tiny fists. I sat in my dimly lit office, surrounded by the ghosts of past cases. The kind of cases that didn't make it to the headlines. The kind that left scars deeper than the ones you could see. This time, it wasn't a cheating spouse or a stolen heirloom. It was about the preservation of beaver habitat. Yeah, you heard me right. The conservation of wildlife had taken a dark turn, and I was about to find out just how deep the rabbi
Pffft, (Score:1)
leave it to beavers.
Mild (Score:5, Insightful)
This is relatively mild compared to what industrial farming does. Maybe beavers have some impact but it's low.
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And human built dams. they too release an ungodly amount of methane (until all that is organic has decomposed)
Read TFA, or TFS even (Score:2)
Most industrial farming doesn't release massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. You're talking about apples vs oranges. Methane is about 28x more dangerous a greenhouse gas than CO2 is! https://energy.ec.europa.eu/to... [europa.eu] Please read TFA and stop assuming so much, especially in public. TFS/TFA is talking about beaver ponds releasing methane stored in permafrost for millennia, as climate drives the beavers further North.
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Yes, the primary source of human caused methane releases seem to be related to the natural gas petroleum industries [epa.gov]
Let's keep our rage focused
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Industrial farming does seem to release lots of NOx, a gas that makes methane look tame as it is about 300x worse then CO2 and hangs around for something like 116 years. Also it depletes the ozone layer. Most of the increase in NOx is from farming with synthetic fertilizer.
One of many sources, https://phys.org/news/2020-10-... [phys.org]
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Thank you very much for adding scientific facts to the discussion. I stand corrected.
Please note, when I initially posted, this thread was *not* much about science, or even the facts stated within the fine summation, which upset me a little given the serious of the topic. It was a lot of beaver jokes and no one understood TFA was about beaver ponds and release of ancient methane gasses.
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Yea, I was hesitant to even click on the comments as I knew it would be like that.
Species makes huge effect on the environment! (Score:5, Insightful)
So up to 12,000 beavers have made a small change to a stream, and that's exacerbating climate change?
The 8 billion large primates (mostly) further south have nothing to do with it?
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More beavers live in Canada than in the USA. Blam Canada!
No one counted the beavers, re-read TFS (Score:2)
No, you misread TFS: "...in the Arctic tundra of Alaska alone, the number of beaver ponds on streams have doubled to at least 12,000 in the past 20 years", and all of those streams are unfreezing the permafrost near them for several meters, releasing methane into the atmosphere that has previously been trapped for millennia.
Presumably those beaver ponds were visible from space. No one counted beavers.
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Shut up and pay more taxes because ... ... of the beavers.
Suspicious (Score:2, Troll)
It seems suspicious that literally every piece of climate research comes to the conclusion that the result of what they're studying is climate baddening. Why isn't it that some phenomena results in climate goodening? Or at least, the slowing of other baddening.
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Obviously the wetlands beavers create will sink a huge amounts of carbon over their lifetimes. It’s strange these researchers have neglected to mention that. They also never seem to mention that higher CO2 concentrations increase plant growth in general, as do higher temperatures. They focus heavily on “runaway warming” and positive feedback loops, but never mention the significant sources of negative feedback. Furthermore, these positive feedback loops always seem to relate to methane, a
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The release of permafrost-stored methane gasses far, far, far outweighs the beavers' carbon capture, by an order of magnitude exponentially.
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Sure, it's fun to spout garbage, but this is what satellite measurements show as the primary sources of methane plumes [esa.int]
Landfills
Gas
Oil
Coal
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Sure, it's fun to spout garbage, but this is what satellite measurements show as the primary sources of methane plumes [esa.int]
Landfills
Gas
Oil
Coal
Landfill gas is straightforward to capture and burn for electricity: https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]
Of course, I am not suggesting society should stop trying to minimise waste! Just that if a landfill isn't being capped and used for cheap electricity, it should be.
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Yes, I agree that methane reclamation from landfills is a thing
Capturing and burning escaped natural gas (mostly methane) is also a thing, but natural gas and petroleum industries seem to be failing to accomplish that
imo, blaming beavers is just scientific whataboutism, based on correlation i.e. beavers live on streams, groundwater seepage from streams warm subsurface methane ice, etc.does not mean beaver responsible just present
The presence of beavers in the formerly frozen North, are simply the 'canary in
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Excess CO2 by itself is to plants what excess sugar is like to humans, more growth of the sickly kind. Works in greenhouses where you can jack up all nutrients.
Excessive heat causes plants to close their stomata to preserve water, limiting their intake of CO2, O2 and growth.
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Not really, life is conservative - it thrives in stable conditions. We've introduced a shock to the system and caused a rapid change. That's going to impact everything negatively at the start, until things figure out how to adapt. So lots of bad outcomes are to be expected.
However, you're posting this on a piece of climate research that SHOWS climate improvements. Beavers are thriving and their range has expanded. They happened to be in a niche that allowed them to rapidly adapt to the change. It's great fo
Compared to fracking? (Score:5, Interesting)
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How much additional methane do 12,000 beavers release into the atmosphere compared to a fracking well?
You misread TFS: "...in the Arctic tundra of Alaska alone, the number of beaver ponds on streams have doubled to at least 12,000 in the past 20 years", and all of those streams are unfreezing the permafrost near them for several meters, releasing methane into the atmosphere that has previously been trapped for millennia.
Presumably those beaver ponds were visible from space. No one counted beavers. On a 100-year timescale, methane has 28 times greater global warming potential than carbon dioxide and is 84 ti [europa.eu]
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The issue is the amount of methane under the permafrost that is being released by the new beaver ponds. The methane trapped under the permafrost can easily kill us all, because there is so much of it and it is so dangerous for the planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
like rain on your wedding day (Score:2)
chef's kiss!
Now this is the kind of ridiculous completely avoidable apocalyptic dystopia I can get behind.
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Sigh. (Score:2)
Yeah, it's all the beaver's fault.
Obviously the worst species on the planet.
So are cow farts off the hook ? (Score:1)
Beavers are good (Score:2)
In any landscape, beavers are a good thing. They create habitat for all sorts of other creatures. Do they sometimes inconvenience humans? Yep, life is like that.
Trying to find climate panic in beaver dams is far fetched. The historical beaver range in Alaska has always reached up to the far north [nhpbs.org]; certainly Western Alaska has always been covered. If there is a change, it is more likely due to reduced hunting and trapping.
But ... but ... (Score:2)
It's a transformation that is happening across the Arctic, the result of landscape engineering on an impressive scale. But this is no human endeavor to reshape the world. It is the work of the North American beaver, and there is no sign of it stopping
But ... can't we un-perso ... I mean, un-beaver them? Refuse to process their payments? Refuse to register their domain names? Cancel their web hosting?????
How to do a 180 without anyone caring. (Score:1)
The beavers are native to Alaska (Score:4, Informative)
Dang beavers... (Score:1)
A model still being developed ... nothing to see (Score:2)
Dear biologists,
You're not scientists. You can watch what is going on because that's what you do best. Stop playing with scientific tools as if you understand them, and please never make predictions based on your misuse of those tools. Not saying you aren't smart, just that you are terribly misguided in your assessment of what you understand. Watch the beavers but stay in your lane, no predictions, no climate commentary.
Thanks
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Beavers moving north... into polar bear territory (Score:2)
Talk about intersectionality gone wrong (Score:1)
Dam Beavers (Score:2)
CAFOs (Score:2)
FFS, roughly a third of human-caused methane emissions come from CAFOs (feedlots for cows and pigs raised for meat) and TFA only speaks in local percentage increases, so I've no idea how much extra methane this is in absolute terms, but it's hard to imagine that it's anything more than a rounding-error compared to the impact from animal agriculture and other industries. Leave the beavers alone and buy locally-raised beef and pork instead of buying it from a big-box grocery store. It's more expensive, so y
deadly (Score:2)
Simple solution (Score:2)
Wear more hats.
The obsession with CO2 (Score:2)
So what if beavers increase CO2? They have other benefits to the ecosystem that are pretty well established. The ponds control stream flow, prevent erosion, and maintain habitats for a host of other species.
The environmental movement has become obsessed with CO2, often to the detriment of previous goals.
The most infamous example of this was the cutting of trees and shipping of them across oceans to feed wood-fired generating plants. Any 1970s environmentalist would have recoiled in horror at the very i
The warming and spreading of Canadian beavers (Score:2)
Canadian beavers were imported to Argentina in the 1950s, and those slippery hairy critters have been spreading so wide and fast the country now considers them to be a menace. Seriously...look it up.