Have you a daughter?
I have my lord.
Let her not walk in the sun. Conception is a blessing but as your daughter may conceive, Look to’t.

Hamlet II:2
 

Will somebody please put a wet blanket over this story once and for all? Or find the NOAA scientist that spawned it and send him on a one way trip to Jamaica? You would think that Chevron drilling holes in the ice and driving huge trucks back and forth across the permafrost would get an occasional mention, but obviously the BEAVER CALAMITY is taking up all the bandwith.

After all, there are only so many pages in a magazine like the Smithsonian.

Beavers Are Reshaping the Arctic Tundra. Here’s Why Scientists Are Concerned

Beavers have the ability to completely transform landscapes. They gnaw through trees, build dams and flood new areas to create ponds, earning them the title of “ecosystem engineers.” But a northward migration of these bucktoothed builders has scientists concerned, Hannah Osborne reports for Newsweek.

A new report about beavers is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) annual Arctic Report Card. By comparing decades-old aerial images of a region in western Alaska with newer ones, researchers found the number of ponds created by beavers has doubled in the last 20 years. They found more than 12,000 ponds; in that same area in 1955, there wasn’t a single one, Alexandra Larkin reports for CBS.

Hey what a coincidence! Researchers counted the number of beaver ponds in 1955 in Martinez and there were zero too!!! And Fairfield. And the Klamath. I bet you could go back all the way to 1905 and find zero beavers on the Mississippi. Whoa.

You don’t think that has anything to do with the fur trade do you?

“There are areas of Alaska that had no evidence of beavers 50 years ago that are now apparently saturated with them,” he says. “It’s just a matter of time before they head even further north. When you consider this is likely happening across the rest of the Arctic in Canada and Russia, that gives you an idea of the scope of this change.”

Beavers can create shallow pools of water when they build dams. That has increased the total surface water in the region, raising concerns since these ponds are warmer than the surrounding ice, causing permafrost—the permanently frozen ground—to thaw out. Permafrost is a critical carbon sink, and its thawing releases carbon dioxide and methane that have been stored for years, Newsweek reports.

Gee you know what ELSE causes permafrost to melt? Lots and lots of green house gasses and a warming climate. Hey I wonder what those beavers are eating in that frozen north. Do you suppose they’re getting takeout? Does Gruphub deliver up there?  I mean if the ground were permanently frozen before they came there couldn’t be any willow growing there right? Hmm why didn’t they just starve?

“Those ponds absorb heat better, they change the hydrology of the area and the permafrost responds to that,” Tape tells the Guardian. “It’s accelerating the effects of climate change. When you realize what’s happened in western Alaska is likely to happen to northern Alaska, it does give you pause.”

There’s also an added concern about how the reshaped landscape and waterways will affect Indigenous communities in Alaska. Beaver dams could affect aquatic food webs and fish populations, as well as make boat access more difficult. More research is currently underway to parse through how the beavers will affect the ecosystem and Indigenous livelihoods, says Helen Wheeler, an ecologist at Anglia Ruskin University in England, in a statement

Ohh no no. Beavers making ponds melting the ice and reflecting more heat into the frozen ground. What are they even doing there? Just causing havoc?

It’s still unclear why the beavers are expanding northwards in the first place. It could be that the effects of a warming climate—such as more abundant vegetation—has made the region more habitable to beavers, the Guardian reports. 

It could also be a booming population of beavers expanding northwards to predator-free zones, or a combination of the two.

“[It] is not entirely clear, but we do know that beavers are having a significant impact on the ecosystems they are colonizing,” Wheeler says.

What ARE beavers doing there? That’s a fine question. Plotting world domination? Rubbing their little paws together as they advance their plan to destroy the planet?

I honestly can not believe that sentence was EVER PUBLISHED IN THE SMITHSONIAN. My forehead head literal hurts from hitting it so many times. You do understand that as the planet warms and the ice melts the treeline moves north which means the things that eat trees move north which means the things that eat BEAVERS move north. Right? You do understand how this basically works, right?