By Reagan Colyer MSU NEWS SERVICE
BOZEMAN – Montana State University professor John Priscu was recently awarded a prestigious, yearlong fellowship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an honor that will facilitate further research into polar ecology in the Himalaya and other extreme terrains.
Priscu, a
Montana University System Regents Professor in the Department of Land
Resources and Environmental Sciences in the MSU College of
Agriculture, first visited China in the 1990s to lecture about his work in
Antarctica. He is one of the nation’s leading researchers in Arctic biogeochemistry
and his 36-year career includes publications in magazines such as “Time” and “Scientific
American” and academic journals such as “Science” and “Nature,” among dozens of
others.
“You think
of Antarctica and you typically think of this giant, lifeless iceberg,” said
Priscu. “It’s pretty hard living on the surface, but underneath it’s not so
bad. Beneath the Antarctic ice sheet lies our planet’s largest wetland. It
might not have the red-winged blackbirds and the cattails, but it’s permanent
water overlying water-saturated sediments, and it’s got bacteria that drive
reactions such as methane production, all of which are defining elements of a
wetland.”
About a
decade ago, Priscu began receiving academic manuscripts from colleagues in
China that focused on research similar to his own. He formed a partnership of
editing and reviewing those manuscripts for publication. Then in 2011, he
received an email from Yongqin Liu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Tibetan
Research Institute who was interested in pursuing her sabbatical in Priscu’s
MSU lab.
Liu spent
the 2012-2013 academic year in Bozeman where she and Priscu studied data
collected from Himalayan glaciers, examining the climate record contained in
ice cores extracted from a depth of about 300 feet.
“The cores
act like a time machine,” Priscu said, “or like the rings of a tree.” Those
300-foot cores held insights into what those environments were like dating back
to around 1959.
DNA
sequences of bacteria showed that before 1990, bacteria in the northern
Himalaya had origins from windblown soils in eastern Europe, whereas those in
the southern Himalaya originated from the marine waters of the Bay of Bengal
and were carried to the mountains via Asian monsoons. To Priscu’s and Liu’s
surprise, after 1990 the bacteria in the southern Himalaya began to look more
similar to those from the soils of eastern Europe, a trend that was related to
increases in soot, or black carbon, deposited on the glacial surfaces, drawing
a connection between the industrialization of western China and the dynamics of
Himalayan glaciers.
“Glaciers in
the Himalaya represent the third largest reservoir of ice on our planet,” said
Priscu. “Glacier-fed rivers originating from the Himalayan mountain ranges
influence the lives of about 40 percent of the world’s population. These
glaciers are melting faster than the polar ice sheets due to factors like
industrialization and climate warming.”
His work
with Liu is providing important new insights into the fate of Himalayan
glaciers.
After
publishing a series of papers with Liu and further collaboration with other
members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Priscu began traveling to Xinjaing
in northwest China and to Tibet to conduct research on mountain glaciers and
give lectures. He recently hosted a doctoral student from the Tibetan Research
Institute and continues to collaborate with Liu, head of her own laboratory
back in China. They have recently worked together on Priscu’s field teams to
study icy systems in Antarctica and Alaska.
This winter,
Priscu was awarded the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Presidential Fellowship for
Distinguished Scientists for 2020. The fellowship will take Priscu, who
routinely visits five or six continents each year, on an extended trip through
China this summer. He will give a series of lectures in Beijing, Nanjing and
Lanzhou in northwestern China, followed by conducting hands-on research on
glaciers around 18,000 feet above sea level in the Tangula Mountains in Tibet.
The study
will focus on microbial communities that live in sediments on the surface of
those glaciers and examine the roles that these microbes play in glacial
chemistry and the absorption of solar radiation, the latter of which can
enhance surface melting.
For Priscu,
it will be the continuation of more than 36 years of international teamwork,
discovery and scientific advancement.
“I have been
lucky to have received funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA to
study the geobiology of ice in Greenland, Antarctica, Alaska and the icy worlds
in the outer solar system,” Priscu said. “I have been equally lucky to work
with Dr. Liu and other scientists from the Chinese Academies. Working with my
Chinese colleagues is inspiring. Science is clearly an international language
that has few intellectual boundaries.”
