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IT IS summer on Herschel Island in the Canadian Arctic and Haydn Thomas is digging in the tundra for teabags. One in particular eludes him. He knows he left it around here last year, but now it is nowhere to be found. “Foolishly, I buried it where the permafrost is very unstable,” he says. An hour or more later, he abandons the search. This is one that got away. But it is a small defeat: there are at least 5000 more teabags waiting to be recovered from tundra around the world.
It may seem bizarre, but burying teabags is all the rage among ecologists. “It’s like a treasure hunt, trying to find them after you’ve left them somewhere for a year, sometimes two years,” says Isla Myers-Smith at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who supervises Thomas’s research. “I like a good treasure hunt,” she says.
Of course, there is more to it than fun. Teabags, it turns out, provide an ingenious window onto a largely hidden world: soil. When soil litter – dead leaves, twigs and other organic material – decomposes, it emits carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. Being able to measure the rate at which this happens is important – and nowhere more so than in the Arctic, where the tundra holds vast quantities of carbon and is emitting it into the air at an accelerating rate as the land heats up. Sizing up this problem should allow us to better predict the ramifications of a warmer world, and chart a course to avert disastrous climate change.
So how did teabags become a secret weapon in understanding the biggest…
