HARVARD COLLEGE, PRESIDENT & FELLOWS OF

Title: MRI: Development of a New Instrument to Observe Isotopic Fluxes of CH4 and CO2 from Arctic Melt Regions, to Link Carbon Fluxes, Climate Feedbacks and Sea Level Rise. New developments in the physical sciences are poised to make critically important contributions to pressing needs of society?particularly in the arena linking global energy options with constraints imposed by irreversible changes to Earth?s climate. The irreversible nature of carbon release from melt zones in the Arctic constitutes one of the most formidable feedbacks in the climate system. While global industry adds some 8 gigatons of carbon from fossil fuel combustion to the atmosphere each year, these northern hemisphere permafrost structures contain upwards of 1000 gigatons of available methane and carbon dioxide. Clearly, the release of just a very small fraction of the permafrost reservoir or the even more immense oceanic reservoir would constitute a powerful climate forcing, the magnitude of which could systematically exceed the amount of carbon released to date by the burning of fossil fuels. The primary objective of this research is to construct a new generation of instrumentation capable of establishing simultaneous measurement of the primary isotopes of methane and carbon dioxide emitted from the carbon reservoirs in the high latitude permafrost regions of the Northern Hemisphere as these systems melt with the advance of increasing temperatures. The determination of the flux of these carbon isotopes from the carbon reservoirs of the soil, permafrost, and clathrate structures of the Arctic is a critically important set of observations that is needed for the prediction of both the rate and irreversibility of the climate forcing resulting from the flow of heat into these systems. This instrumentation program reflects highly interdisciplinary nature of climate research at Harvard that directly links faculty, postdoctoral scientists, professional staff, graduate and undergraduate students across the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and engages the Harvard University Center for the Environment. These new observations will involve highly collaborative activities with colleagues studying the fusion of in situ data with regional models, with colleagues studying the biogeochemistry of carbon dioxide and methane release from reservoirs at mid and high latitudes, with colleagues studying the paleorecord, with colleagues involved in developing computer modeling strategies for climate forecasting, and with the large community of undergraduates and graduate students at Harvard and at other universities across the country. Student-level engagement from concept to completion is crucial, not only to the successful construction and deployment of the proposed carbon isotope instrument, but to the broader scientific future of this Nation, which will come to rely even more on scientists whose training and philosophy is centered on the physical sciences in the service of key societal objectives. Because of the scale of the carbon flux problem, the design of the instrument will be made freely available to the broader climate research community.

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