From left, Professors Xiaohua Gou from Lanzhou University (LU), Fritz Nelson and Del Levia from UD, and LU graduate student Fen Zhang at the cultural square in the city center of Xining. The tall buildings in the background had not been constructed yet at the time of Nelson’s 1993 visit to the city. Zhang will spend the 2011-2012 academic year in residence at UD, working with Levia on dendroclimatology research, as well as the ecohydrology of temperate deciduous forests.

On top of the world

UD geographers collaborate on Tibetan Plateau research

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11:39 a.m., July 6, 2011--A 10-day trip to western China’s Tibetan Plateau in June by two University of Delaware geographers may yield enhanced research collaborations in this vast area so high and cold it’s often referred to as Earth’s “third polar region.”

Profs. Del Levia and Frederick (Fritz) Nelson in the University of Delaware Department of Geography presented a series of lectures at Lanzhou University (LU) and the State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The National Key Basic Research Program of China and CAS supported the trip.

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The visit to Lanzhou was a reunion between the UD geographers and Professors Meixue Yang and Xiaohua Gou. Yang, a senior scientist with Key Lab, and Gou, a professor in LU’s College of Earth and Environmental Science, had spent two years at UD in 2006-2008, establishing ties among research programs at the three institutions.

Yang, a climatologist and geocryologist, was a visiting scientist with the UD Permafrost Group. Gou, a dendroclimatologist, a researcher who determines past climates from tree rings, is affiliated with Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and formed a research partnership with Levia while in the U.S.

Gou and Levia have co-authored several journal articles about climate change on the Tibetan Plateau since the late 1200s. Their research has yielded insights about how people may need to adapt to changing climate.

Recent work has focused on the changing treeline dynamics of Qilian juniper in relation to climate change—work that has implications for forest-climate interactions. Fen Zhang, a doctoral student of Gou’s, recently won a prestigious fellowship from the Chinese Scholarship Council to study with Levia at UD for one year. They will continue work on dendroclimatology, as well as the ecohydrology of temperate deciduous forests.

Changing dynamics of the Tibetan Plateau

The Tibetan Plateau is a unique area of extreme elevation and cold, dry climate, with widespread permafrost — and growing economic development. Access to Lhasa, the administrative center of the Tibet Autonomous Region, has improved dramatically thanks to a railway between Lanzhou and Lhasa engineered for ice-rich permafrost conditions. The 1,740-mile (2,800-kilometer) route between the cities can be comfortably traversed in less than 24 hours, in contrast to Nelson’s first trip in 1993, a week-long adventure in a rickety bus traveling over dirt roads, with lodging in People’s Liberation Army barracks.

The Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) program, the focus of Nelson’s lectures, monitors the dynamics of the layer of seasonally frozen ground between the surface and the upper layer of permafrost. The program obtains data from over 200 permafrost observatories with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation and numerous research programs with which individual CALM scientists are affiliated.

Nelson has been CALM’s co-principal investigator since the program’s inception in the early 1990s, and its director from 2003 to 2009. The program today is headquartered at George Washington University under the direction of Nikolay I. Shiklomanov, a UD doctoral graduate in permafrost science, and UD administers the program website.

CALM incorporates permafrost observatories on the Tibetan Plateau, which have yielded data used extensively by Chinese investigators interested in the impacts of climate change and closely connected economic activities there, including grazing. Yang and Nelson have published several papers on the topics, including a July 2010 article in Earth-Science Reviews.

While in Lanzhou, Nelson worked with Yang and students Guoning Wan and Xuejia Wang of the Graduate University of CAS on the dynamics of seasonally frozen ground at lower elevations on the plateau. Nelson also was invited to join the editorial board of the CAS English-language journal Sciences in Cold and Arid Regions.

Among the “high points” of the visit, the UD geographers report, was a field trip to the eastern Tibetan cultural region. The excursion included a reconnaissance visit to one of Gou’s field sites, where collaborative dendroclimatology work is under way. The group spent a night in Xining, where they gained a firsthand appreciation of the scope of China’s building boom, and toured Ta’er (Kumbum) Monastery. They also visited Qinghai Lake, China’s largest inland water body, at nearly 2 miles (3,200 meters) above sea level.

Edited by Tracey Bryant

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