Space station charm

The SPRUCE experiment, coordinated by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, is trying to see what it would take to set the deep carbon off. If it doesn’t exactly erupt into methane, what will happen? In the best case, will the bog just continue to suck up carbon gases from the atmosphere as it always has?

With such questions in mind, ORNL designed and built the warming laboratory that sprawls into the bog like a space station — and shares the same sterile charm.

Grated boardwalks of gray plastic supported by silvery metal posts branch out at right angles to 17 plots, where they encircle small orchestras of scientific instruments.

Football-sized cylinders hang from poles and girders, and bottomless pots and tubs are embedded in the Sphagnum. Most of these devices measure some variation of carbon in gas emissions or in the water.

“This big cylinder is for measuring the greenhouse gases,” Kostka said. “Right now you can see there’s a cover on top of it. And what the cover does is trap the gas inside the cylinder.”

But nature is the passenger on this journey, and the researchers take meticulous measures to ensure it is undisturbed, aside from the warming, so it can be studied in an authentic state.

Amongst the metal and plastic, rhododendrons dance diagonally over the shaggy moss, and cotton grass shoots straight up a foot or two, bursting into cotton-ball blossoms. Above them, tamarack and spruce tower alongside a weather scaffold.

Make mine hot

Most of the plots at SPRUCE have underground heating elements, and most are also enclosed in semi-transparent greenhouses as tall as the treetops inside them.

Above the door to one enclosure hangs a sign reading, “Welcome to a warmer future. +6.75° C, elevated CO 2 .” (That +6.75 Celsius would be +12.15° in Fahrenheit.)

Another reads +2.25° C and no elevated CO 2 ; yet another reads +4.50° C, elevated CO 2 . The enclosures range from no additional heat or carbon dioxide all the way up to +9° C and added CO 2 — a really extreme scenario that probably wouldn’t play out on Earth for at least 100 years.

Vents blast warm air into the enclosures, none of which have roofs, which allows the heat to waft out, on purpose.

“The open top is really so the gases and the precipitation can exchange within the chamber. We didn’t want a closed top chamber like an aquarium,” said Randy Kolka, a scientist with the Forest Service.

The idea is not to isolate the plots, but to have them participate in the natural weather of their surroundings, while riding a few degrees above it.

“There comes more rain,” Kostka says, as the precipitation dampens everyone in the enclosure.

The natural exchange goes for the water table, too. The enclosure allows natural ebbs and flows, and monitors them for traces of old carbon.