Dear MRI Community,
I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come? (Psalm 121).
This has been the first of my 15 years as a professor that I have not been to the mountains for field work, and I miss them. Pandemic policies have exiled me from research sites in the Peruvian Andes and the Great Basin, Nevada, and I am housebound on the till plains of central Ohio, ‘professoring’ fully online while managing the kids in ‘school’ to the extent that exists. The pinnacle of my hill climbing in seven months has been a trail run up and down the terminal moraine complexes left behind by the Laurentide ice sheet at the Last Glacial Maximum. Now, as COVID-19 cases re-escalate and we see further despairing limits on even holiday travel, it is hard to muster hope. Yet I do find gratitude for both our MRI community, which has bookended a year of COVID-19 disruption, and the technology making it possible to sustain research, even as we grieve real losses.
At the 2019 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco last December, we conceptualized how elevation dependent climate – not only temperature – changes might manifest in mountains during
an off-site workshop led by Nick Pepin. We also wrestled with challenges of filling daunting gaps in observations. Within the MRI session
'Mountain Weather and Climate in a Warmer World,' co-convened with Mathias Vuille and Connie Millar, I presented 12 years of hourly temperatures from an embedded sensor network in Great Basin National Park (GBNP), maintained by students during annual educational research training expeditions. Shortly thereafter, I got one last pre-lockdown trip to the mountains, attending the
MRI SLC meeting in early March 2020 on the shores of Lake Geneva. There, we had fellowship in the compound of an ecumenical retreat center amidst the vineyards that draw life from the Alpine runoff. We sat without masks, and shared meals between meetings; we tasted the wine, and it was good. Though we sensed things were going to change, who could have known just how abruptly things would shut down – and for how long?
In lieu of travel, work has been challenging and frequently disrupted from home, but virtual communication has facilitated focus on data and writing. Our
AGU poster is now published as part of a special research topic collection in Frontiers that I co-edited with Alfonso Fernandez in Chile and Michel Baraer in Canada titled ‘
Connecting Mountain Hydroclimate Through the American Cordilleras.’ The 16 papers span a range of themes, scales, and geography, from Alaska to Patagonia, with the aim exploring hydroclimatic changes with an interhemispheric perspective. I’m now getting ready to co-chair sessions at the upcoming virtual
2020 AGU Fall Meeting with my fellow
MRI SLC Member Shawn Marshall and Gabrielle Vance from the
MRI Coordination Office. We are looking forward to two oral sessions and a poster session on ‘Environmental and Climate Changes in Global Mountain Regions.’ We will also meet online for an
MRI side event, so do join us, even if you are not participating in AGU.
This time apart has stymied much of our field efforts, and there have been significant losses. My PhD student Emilio Mateo escaped Peru days after I returned from the MRI SLC meeting, catching literally one of the last flights out before Lima shut down. He had to abandon field work in the Cordillera Blanca, where he was sampling debris covered glaciers, and just before being able to install replacement meteorological equipment. Those are data that cannot be replaced. How many other such data will we lose in mountains globally? And, as if to prove the point, we’ve subsequently heard from our Peruvian colleagues of more of our sensors failing. Yet that only begins the real hurt at this time; a long-time friend with whom I’ve shared many mountain expeditions is among the many who have died. There are real injustices in the economic impacts and patterns of infection that differentially impact.
Nevertheless, if COVID-19 has impeded or stifled mountain climate change research, people have sustained it. When our GBNP field trip was cancelled, we did not lose data because our collaborator and co-author Gretchen Baker, NPS, was able to follow our emailed guide and GPS coordinates in order to download and service the loggers. Another of my PhD students, Gabriel Zeballos-Castellon, could not return to the Bolivian Altiplano to complete additional ground truthing for his atlas of bofedales this year, but has sustained progress and extended value by involving university students in La Paz. I’ve been enabled by Zoom links to attend conferences, and deliver outreach lectures to wide flung audiences via the internet, even while socially distant. Finally, Michalea King, who came with us to GBNP as an undergrad, completed her PhD, published in
Nature, and was
interviewed by incoming Biden climate advisor John Kerry this year about climate change and the Greenland Ice Sheet. Michalea also inspired my online class with a guest Zoom lecture – the highlight of my teaching semester, and one of the young tech-savvy researchers who can articulate science to policy-makers and will change this world for the better.
What will become of our field instrumentation, and when will I return to the hills? I don’t know. Lockdown has revealed both the strength and weakness of a field approach to data acquisition that relies on regular visitations, by and with people. But I know it is our generation’s challenge to creatively sustain these observations and research in the mountains, and this will be met as we connect with people in new ways over new distances. The mountains are venerable, places to encounter the divine, but at the heart of the joy we encounter within them are the bonds of community. So I encourage you to come virtually, connect, and share with us at the
MRI side event on 10 December. See you then!
Best wishes to everyone,
