Near the Top of the World Axel Heiberg Island is cold, but a magnet for scientists to study fossil forest

Of all the improbable places to go, Axel Heiberg Island must rank high. Located near the top of the world, just a few hundred miles from the North Pole at 80 degrees north latitude in Canada’s Nunavut Territory, it is a desert – dry, treeless, dark and bitterly cold for most of the year. Four months of the year it is bathed in low-angle, continuous light, with the sun circling the horizon.

Bleak and strange as this landscape is, it is a magnet for scientists who come to study its fossil forests. Forty-five million years ago in the Eocene period, when the Earth was much warmer, the island supported towering Dawn Redwoods, or Metasequoia. That tree, with its needle-shaped leaves, deciduous like the larch, grew in warm temperatures and low light under conditions that no longer exist at Axel Heiberg and which are rare enough anywhere. As a result, the Metasequoia is almost extinct, according to Richard Jagels, professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystem Science at the University of Maine.

Jagels is one of the scientists drawn to Axel Heiberg and spent three summers there, in 1997, 1999 and 2000, studying the remnants of ancient Dawn Redwood forests. He will talk about his visits and show slides at 7:30 p. m. Tuesday, Oct. 19, at the Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden.

“The temperature varied a lot,” Jagels recalled in a recent interview. “Sometimes it would snow, sometimes it would be in the 50s and 60s. It was actually warmer in the middle of the night when there was less cloud cover over the pole.” One could tell the time not by how high the sun was in the sky, but where it was on the horizon.

Jagels and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania lived in tents. The second and third summers they also had orange Quonset huts they could use for lab work. To get to Axel Heiberg Island, they flew from Ottawa to Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, a huge territory about the size of Europe and California combined, with a population of only 25,000. From Iqaluit they flew to Arctic Bay, then to Resolute on Cornwallis Island and finally by a smaller, Twin-Otter plane to Axel Heiberg, an island roughly the size of Maine.

Axel Heiberg was uninhabited when Otto Sverdrup of Norway explored it from 1898 to 1902. Sverdrup named the island after the patron who financed his expedition.

“From the air it looks like nothing is growing,” Jagels said. But melting glaciers create streams, which in turn allow the growth of sedges, and that in turn allows the presence of musk oxen, which are shaggy, big-headed prehistoric-looking beasts. The musk ox, Jagels said, belongs to the goat family and is not really that big. “Take away the hair and you have a small, skinny animal.” He noted, however, it is not wise to be on a higher elevation than a male musk ox, which might feel challenged and charge.

Also surviving in this severe climate are arctic hare, wolf, fox, lemmings and small Peary caribou. Birds include almost-invisible ptarmigans, ruddy turnstones and jaegers. Arctic willow, only a couple of inches tall, creeps along the ground, and cotton grass and heather grow, as well as alpine-type wildflowers.

And on warm, windless days, clouds of mosquitoes descend.

Jagels was willing to put up with the mosquitoes because most of his work centers on how trees adapt to climate change. The swamp forests of 135-foot tall Metasequoia in the warm, low-light habitat of Eocene-era Axel Heiberg are gone. Only a few survive in the wild, in a remote, mountainous area of China; the nearest large city is Chengdu. After the Eocene, the world cooled, but now the planet is on the cusp of another dramatic climate change, lending relevance to Jagels’ work. Asked about global warming, the forestry professor said the process is “probably already irreversible – all we may be able to do is speed it up, or slow it down a bit.” Once things get to a certain point, change can happen rapidly, he said – that is, in hundreds rather than millions of years. Already, he observed, rising seawater has been flooding out native villages in the Arctic.

Metasequoia trees, related to redwoods and bald cypress, are rare – so rare they were known only as fossils until they were found in China in the 1940s. There are several in a greenhouse across from Nutting Hall on the Orono campus, where they are being studied in relation to low-light intensity, a kind of light similar to that of the high latitudes the trees adapted to so well millions of years ago. The trees, only 5 or 6 feet tall, have soft, bright-green needlelike leaves that turn red in the fall. The bark is red, and appears to be shedding. Back in his Orono office, Jagels opened a plastic bag and took out a piece of wood. Missing some of its cellulose, it felt light. Unlike most fossils, it had not mineralized and turned to rock – it was still wood, mummified wood.

Forty five million years old.

Richard Jagels will give a talk, “Living in the High Arctic: Freezing to Death or Basking in the Sun?” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 19, at Fields Pond Audubon Center, call 989-2591.