Day Seven: Journey to Alaska, the Climate Frontier. Kenai Peninsula.

Liz Shaw | Flint Journal By Liz Shaw | Flint Journal
on August 14, 2008 at 10:27 PM, updated August 20, 2008 at 11:53 AM

Day 1: Journey to Alaska

Day 2: Rain, Retreating Glaciers and Cultural Bridges

Day 3: Climbing Mt. Alyeska


Day 5: Fishing the 20-Mile River

Day 6: Anchorage and Aleut Wisdom

Day 7: Kenai Peninsula

Imagine a white spruce forest in the heart of Alaska's Kenai Peninsula.

Then imagine it gone.

Today we visited the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge near Sterling on the Kenai Peninsula, where U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ecologist Dr. Ed Berg showed us how climate change is affecting Alaska's forests.

Just a few decades ago, the peninsula was thick with old growth forests rich with massive white spruce trees 300 years old. Now, we're walking along a trail past haggard gray skeletons, victims of the pine bark beetle infestation that has ravaged this entire region.

White spruce forests have been devastated by pine bark beetle infestations.

There have always been cycles of pine bark beetle infestations, rising and falling in tune with natural rhythms, usually in 50 year cycles and triggered by more than two warm summers in a row where average temperatures remain above 51 degrees.

But Kenai weather cycles went into overdrive in the late 1980s, Berg said. From 1987 to 1997 the summers remained unusually warm, with the old warmer-cooler cycles ramped up and more intense.
That fostered an unprecedented population boom among the beetles, which have swept through the refuge forests and destroyed virtually the entire mature white spruce population.

Only one small area, near Seldovia at Kachemak Bay off the Cook Inlet -- has survived the onslaught, due to wind currents off the bay which have thus far blocked the beetles' invading push.
"I like to go there at least once a year, just to remind myself what a real living forest looks like," said Berg.

The ecological impact doesn't stop at the death of the trees, Berg said. Once the trees died, logging moved in. The dead trees are still solid enough for lumber for three years. After that they begin rotting from the outside due to fungus infestations but can still be chipped or pulped.
Roads were built so logging trucks could get in to clear the trees and haul them out. With roads and spaces cleared of forests came subdivisions.
Real estate agents loved it, Berg said, and coined the phrase "emerging view" to promote it.
"That's a much bigger ecological response than just the trees drying," Berg said. "This is very permanent landscape change. There's no going back from it."

The Kenai's wetlands -- massive groundwater-fed peat mats called fens-- are also under assault as inland water levels drop and temperatures rise. Core samples of the peat, 22 feet deep and 13,700 years old (up to 19,000 years old in some places) indicate the area has been wetland throughout that entire time period, since the end of the last major ice age. Over the last 30 years -- mostly in the last 15-20 years -- shrubs and black spruce trees have been moving in for the first time. It's a primary indicator the peat wetlands are drying out, Berg said.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife ecologist Ed Berg holds out a handful of drying peat.

The changing ecosystem could ramp up climate change even more. The wetlands formed a natural fire breaks, while black spruce are highly flammable. At the same time, lightning strikes are on the rise. The result: raging wildfires releasing even more carbon into the atmosphere.

Elsewhere on the peninsula, Berg has observed changes he and other scientists have not yet been able to explain. In one very specific region, white birch trees are being destroyed by something they've coined "black ring condition" for the trademark black bands girdling the trees,which are actually the scars of something destroying the inner bark in a band around the trunk, cutting off its life supply of nutrients. The cause is still unknown. Scientists have explored and discarded possible causes from fungus to sap-sucking birds.One current theory is a flying squirrel might be chiseling out the inner bark to eat the sugar. The problem is flying squirrels don't live here, Berg said.

A mysterious phenomenon called black ring is killing white birch in a small region of the Kenai.

Could it be another sign of changing dynamics? Berg would like to find out the answer but admits he also just plains like the mystery.

One thing's for certain: even when they do solve this particular eco-mystery, there's sure to be another -- and another -- yet ahead.

Check out the Outdoors page in Thursday's Flint Journal and here on the Outdoors Impact blog on Aug. 19 for the final installment on Journey to Alaska, the Climate Frontier.