Warming Up to a New Task

A frigid Alaska village, formerly a Cold War listening post, is now a research hub on climate change. Here, the effects come ‘fastest and first.’

Inside the cramped, bustling terminal, experts coming and going hail one another and trade notes on their projects, which measure changing carbon levels, melting ice, rising temperatures and a host of other striking physical changes here.

Barrow, a onetime listening post during the Cold War, is now a crossroads for research on a warming planet. As scientists race to understand global warming, which they widely agree is due in part to human consumption of fossil fuels, the effects are most clearly discernible in the Earth’s polar regions.


LA Times