Wetland Casualties

The days are short already in Alberta and the differences are marked from eastern Pennsylvania. The stars last night were beautiful.  They burned brightly from the deep darkness that surrounded Meanook Biological Research Station, and the Milky Way spilled across the sky to remind us how our galaxy earned its name.  Every tiny pin-point blazed with great clarity.  No Aurora Borealis yet, but maybe we will be lucky to see them later in the trip.  The aspen, birch, and larch have lost their leaves and fall is hanging on here by a thread with the looming long, cold, and dark of winter just around the corner.  We are driving now, to Fort McMurray, as I type.  Meanook was welcoming last night, but it was a short short stop-over.  Onward to the uglies of oil-town, Canada.  A few years ago, I was able to get above it all in a helicopter and was able to see the expanse from a bird's eye view.  Not exactly a pretty picture.

The road to Fort McMurray (63) is being twinned.   Which means for us, that as they truck up all the huge equipment they will need for their winter activities up here, we are stuck in long lines of machinery that take up the entire width of the road, while on both sides of us, massive earth movers are clearing and stripping football-field-widths of forest and wetlands.  We just passed a massive tube that took up an entire two full lanes of highway.  Don’t ask me what that tube will be used for, but I do know it represents the massiveness of the projects up here.  It is a sad sight and rather frustrating.  What should be a 4 hour drive through beautiful boreal systems has turned into an epic trek through a bit of a wasteland.   We just passed one of our old fen sites – a beautiful patterned fen -  and you could see some pvc water wells still out there only about 10 meters from the freshly piled dirt.  I am guessing we will abandon that site.  We have two more sites on this road and I worry for them and for our research and for the wetlands in general.  I suppose with all of this construction there is now ample opportunity to document short and long-term changes in these places, but it sure is depressing. 

We’ve been trying to put together a project looking at the effects of drought and flooding using roads as our dams and differences are already apparent here in this big mess.  This really isn’t surprising at all.  Changes in the hydrology make big differences when you are talking wetlands and there are huge changes going on here.  Google Earth is a great resource for checking out all the oil pads and roads and how all of this manipulation wreaks havoc on these systems.  Carbon cycling changes, vegetation changes, chemistry changes, pretty much everything changes on both sides of the road and these changes are translated deep into the systems often in ways we don’t understand.  Sometimes the most important thing to appreciate is that ultimately, we know very very little.  Guess that is what science is all about.   

 I understand a nor’easter is happening back home and as I move through space and time and dust and stench here, I hope all is well with my place and my neighbors and my loved ones.