The Arctic back and forth

and melting ice

Ellesmere, Canada's northernmost island, in the summer of 2012. Anne Bjorkman is sleeping in a small cabin. Suddenly she wakes up to the sound of glass breaking. When she looks at the window, she sees the head of a polar bear peeking through.

Text: Eva Lundgren Photos: From Svalbard (polar bears from Ellesmere Island)

We find Anne Bjorkman in the basement of the Botany Building, where she is sorting through the equipment that she and her colleagues brought with them on an expedition to Svalbard, one of three areas where her team has ongoing research projects. The equipment includes different measuring instruments and drills, but also packets of hair nets for various plants, for keeping out pollinating insects.

Her field of research is plant ecology, specifically how plants in the Arctic are affected by climate change. She has conducted research in the Arctic many times before, but this time the expedition ran into some problems. – Some of our equipment was sent back and forth, and because of the SAS strike several colleagues almost didn’t manage to get there. However, Svalbard in the summer is fantastic as there is plenty of light both day and night. You can work as long as you like, and the nature is wonderful with all the birds, polar bears, and wild reindeer. But I was surprised at the disruption to the landscape, primarily due to intensive mining for coal in the mountains.

The other area where Anne Bjorkman's team conducts research is Latnjajaure, 20 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The third research area is Greenland. – My field season in Greenland was special, because that year my husband and eight-month-old son came with me. It is relatively easy doing research in Greenland. Near the field station there is a small community with shops and other home comforts where you can also use your mobile phone.

Research on the Arctic is important, not least for understanding climate change. Forty-two percent of the Earth's soil carbon is stored in the frozen tundra; if the tundra thaws, the consequences for global warming will be staggering. – This is why it’s so worrying that temperatures are rising three times as fast in the Arctic, compared to the rest of the world.

And the high Arctic heats up particularly quickly. Every summer, scientists put out markers where the glacier ends, and each year the ice has retreated a little more.

Climate change leads, among other things, to mosses declining while shrubs spread. It also leads to taller plants moving into the Arctic, explains Anne Bjorkman. – Taller plants tend to trap snow, which acts like a blanket to keep the soil warm in the winter. Taller plants are also more likely to stick up above the surface of the snow, and their dark branches absorb more heat than the white snow. Both phenomena accelerate the warming effect. On the other hand, large leaves provide more shade in the summer, which has a cooling effect on the soil.

Climate change also results in plants that are adapted to warmer climates starting to spread over larger areas. Although, that is not always the case. – During my PhD work on Ellesmere Island, we did experiments using a number of open-top greenhouses that warm the air inside. We planted seeds from plants that were adapted to a warmer climate farther south, as well as seeds that belonged to the area's natural population. The hypothesis was that in the greenhouses, the plants that were adapted to a warmer climate would outperform the plants that were naturally present in that location. But that turned out not to be true. On

Photo: KATRIN BJÖRNSDÓTTIR

the contrary, the local populations had both a higher survival rate and grew larger than the heat-adapted plants. The experiment thus shows that temperature is only one of many factors that affect how and where a plant thrives. Things like the composition of the soil, day length, and grazing pressure are also significant.

Anne Bjorkman grew up in Virginia, USA. She got her Swedish surname from her great-grandfather, who came from Jönköping. That she would study Biology was a given – nature has always interested her. However, as her interest included nearly everything related to the subject, it was not immediately obvious exactly what she would focus on.

– I received my bachelor's degree from Cornell University and then I spent a few years doing field studies. For a while I was in Costa Rica studying capuchins, small monkeys with white faces. Later, I went to Panama to do research on manakins, a type of passerine. Eventually, I applied to a number of different universities but decided that the University of British Columbia in Vancouver suited me best. I was there for over six years and did my master's and PhD there.

Since then, Anne Bjorkman has worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Leipzig, Edinburgh, Aarhus, and Frankfurt. She also studied in Russia for four months and learned to speak enough Russian to do field studies in Siberia. In 2019, she came to Gothenburg with her family, and at the same time received a five-year scholarship from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. – I enjoy the Scandinavian balance between work and leisure. I also prefer the Swedish system for external grants, where more researchers receive a little less funding, than the American one, where a few researchers receive a lot. The Swedish view of doctoral students also appeals to me. Here, they are seen as colleagues who have four years to finish their thesis. And if they teach, they are compensated with additional research time. In Germany, doctoral students are considered to

be more like students, and the duration of study is only three years, regardless of teaching.

Research is interesting in itself – but of course field studies are particularly exciting. Anne Bjorkman's more strenuous adventures include five summers of fieldwork on Ellesmere Island. – It takes three hours to fly there, with special planes equipped with skis to land on the ice. Other research teams camp up there, but my team had access to a couple of cabins set up by the Canadian police in the 1950s. The cabins do not have running water, sewage or an internet connection, but they do have some solar panels so you can keep your laptop running and send short text messages by satellite phone. There were generally about five people in my team, and we became very close friends; indeed, they were my only contact with humanity for two and a half months.

To protect themselves from polar bears, expedition members in the Arctic always carry shotguns. However, they are initially loaded with a rubber bullet, and it is only in an extreme emergency that you would shoot using live rounds. In most instances, polar bears are scared away with "bear bangers" – a small cylinder with a firecracker in it that you launch into the air.

It was one of these bear bangers that Anne Bjorkman grabbed when she was woken up one night by a polar bear trying to get inside her cabin. – It had poked its head in through the window just a few metres from my bed, but it was obviously far too big to actually get through. I started banging on the wall as hard as I could to scare him off and to wake up my colleagues.

She yelled at her colleagues to grab the gun and went outside the cabin to fire a bear banger and scare the animal back towards the ice. – It worked, but on his way past the cabin he saw me and stopped, just a few metres away. We stared at each other for a second. Then I tried to set off another banger, to keep him moving, but this one was a dud and didn’t fire. The only thing I had was the empty cartridge from the first banger, so I threw it at him, and then he ran off.

After a visit by a polar bear, it is very important to keep an eye out to make sure that it has really been scared off and does not come back.

So, the team stayed awake and scouted the area. In fact, an hour later the polar bear was on his way back to the cabin again.

– But this time we were all ready, and my colleagues and I came out shooting bear bangers and guns and making all kinds of noise. After that the polar bear left and didn’t come back.

Anne Bjorkman was never particularly afraid, though. – I was standing right at the door and could have easily slipped back inside if the situation had become dangerous, so mostly I remember just being impressed by seeing such a large, powerful, and beautiful animal. So mostly it was a feeling of awe, though I admit it took a while before I stopped jumping at every loud noise.

Dried lingon berries.

It had poked its head in through the window just a few metres from my bed …

Photo: JOHAN WINGBORG

Anne Bjorkman

Works as: Senior lecturer at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences. A Wallenberg Academy Fellow, newly appointed Research Leader of the Future by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. Background: Studies at Cornell University, PhD at University of British Columbia, post doc. in Germany, Denmark and Scotland. Family: Husband, two sons, a dog and a cat. Latest book: A historical detective story. When I have time to read for fun, I want it to be something as far from reality as possible. Latest film: Monsters, Inc. (with my 4-year-old). Favourite food: Vegetarian tacos and Boston Cream Pie. Personal interests: Other than science? Nature, hiking, travel, piano, classical music, baking.