Peter Doran at the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica Courtesy of Peter Doran
Earth scientist Peter Doran splits his time between Antarctica, where he is a co-primary investigator of the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research Project (LTER), and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In January 2002, Doran published a paper in Nature asserting that the majority of Antarctica had cooled between 1966 and 2000. Climate change skeptics and newspaper editorials cited the study as evidence against global warming: Shortly after the publication in Nature, Joseph Perkins of the San Diego Union-Tribune sarcastically wrote, "Oh dear. What will the doomsayers say now?" More recently, Michael Crichton referenced Doran's study in his 2004 novel State of Fear, and Ann Coulter hailed the paper in her 2006 book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. (Scientists have overwhelmingly criticized both books.)
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Doran grew frustrated, and on July 27, 2006, he published an op-ed in The New York Times calling climate change skeptics on their misuse of his research. He also asked that his name be "removed from the list of scientists who dispute global warming."
Today, Doran's research at McMurdo focuses on Antarctic lakes—specifically the manner in which climate affects their ecology.
Why do your field work in the McMurdo Dry Valleys?
The Dry Valleys are one of the coldest and driest land-based ecosystems on earth. You can't really go much colder and drier and expect to find anything living, so it's looking at life on the edge, essentially.
The idea is to try to document why and how the ecosystem there survives, what the long-term changes are—as climate changes, how does it respond?—and try to tie that into what's going on elsewhere on Earth.
How have these extreme conditions affected life in the Dry Valleys?
The big thing is that there are no animals. There are no bears or ducks wandering around. The highest order of organism is soil nematodes that are a millimeter long. So our studies, just because of that, are very different, because we don't have a lot of external influence from these larger animals. Mostly, we're living off of past events. We have a very strong legacy in our ecosystem—a resource legacy where the microbes are living off of energy inputs that were delivered years ago.
What have you learned about this ecosystem?
One of the things we found is that our ecosystem responds very rapidly to climate change. It's much more able to take these extremes in climate because it's already living at the edge. The quickness of the response to the changing climate, amongst global ecosystems, is pretty remarkable.
And yet the other side is this legacy where impacts can go on for thousands of years. These long-term resources hang around and drive the ecosystem, but you also get rapid shifts back and forth in the make-up of the ecosystem.
How has the climate been changing in Antarctica?
In our 2002 Nature paper, we talked about the trends over the last 14 years in the Dry Valleys. It showed a cooling in the Dry Valleys, which is still going on today. With the cooling you get dropping lake levels and thicker ice covers, and with thicker ice covers there's less sunlight going into the lakes, so the productivity goes down.
In the soil environment, there was a decrease in the numbers of nematodes, and that's still going on today as well. It's kind of mysterious.
We also went out and looked at what's been going on continent-wide. We teamed up with John Walsh, now at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who does more large-scale climate measurements, and we showed that the entire continent—about 60 percent of it—has, over the previous 30 years, been cooling.