Katey Walter regularly camps out in the Arctic. A rising star in the world of climate science, she studies methane release from lakes. When we met in her Fairbanks University office she was somewhat sunburnt: she had just got back from a few weeks on the Seward Peninsula, ‘coring’ lakes to discover how today’s rapid thawing compares with thawing hundreds, even thousands of years ago.
I ask her about her research. ‘The Arctic is very sensitive and we are already observing dramatic changes,’ she tells me. ‘The ice is melting in the sea, in glaciers and in the ground. When the permafrost melts it creates sink holes that fill up with water. They expand into small ponds, which in turn expand, ‘eating’ the frozen ground around them, thawing it further. Any organic matter in the permafrost sinks to the bottom of the lake where it gets digested by microbes, which make methane.’
