This summer will be Greg’s last summer at Alex Fiord. He has been coming here since 1980 and his long-term warming experiment has been running since 1992, making it the longest-running warming experiment in the Arctic.
This year, he will finally be able to conduct the final piece of this study – a piece that hasn’t been possible until now due to its invasive nature. All this time, Greg and his team have been focusing on what’s going on above ground, but for the most part, how the plants have responded below ground has remained a mystery. So this summer, since the experiments will be ending, it will finally be possible to take full biomass samples and examine the effect of more than 30 years of warming of the plants – below ground. It will be a huge undertaking and will require hours and hours of digging, sorting and weighing roots, but the final dataset will be incredibly valuable.
At the end of the season there is also the enormous job of removing all the experiments, packing everything up, and flying it back down south. Greg wishes to leave the area exactly as when they found it when they first arrived back in 1980. This includes removing all experiments from the tundra, but also removing all the science equipment from the cabins, as well as the decades of nostalgic drawings, photos, rocks, pieces of art, poetry and other things stuck to the walls by all the people who have been lucky to spend time at Alexandra Fiord over the last 40 years. Greg plans to bring all these memories back south, and hopes to be able to display them at a museum or at UBC.
For Greg it will of course also be a very emotional goodbye. He has given a significant part of his life to this incredible place and it has shaped him more than he has shaped it. It is not a part of the world you just go back to visit, so this will likely be the last time he runs around in the valley at Alex Fiord. It’s hard to imagine how it will feel for him to say goodbye to Alex – a place that he’s dedicated his life’s work to, and also a place that he has called home more or less every summer for the past 45 years. However, he knows it’s time to say goodbye, and he is looking forward to enjoying summers down south and getting back into sailing back on Vancouver Island.
Sofie, Jakob, and the Tundra Ecology Lab
Sofie
Jakob
Amplis Foto is joining Greg and his research crew this summer to document it all – in the hopes that we can help tell a story that will educate and inspire viewers about the science, history, and importance of this remote and beautiful part of the world.
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