Tomorrow I head to Alaska for a 2.5-week science journalism fellowship at a small field camp on the North Slope. The camp, Lake Toolik, is run by the University of Alaska and houses about 100 scientists who study mostly polar ecology.

For example, they're looking at the impact of melting permafrost on future climate change. Permafrost holds an enormous amount of organic matter frozen inside. When it melts it releases CO2 and methane – both greenhouse gases – into the atmosphere, causing more warming and creating a positive feedback loop. (Click here to download a PDF of a story I wrote about a scientist focusing on methane release from melting permafrost. The story starts on Page 3.) Scientists at Toolik are also looking at whether the increase in shrubs in the arctic, which is caused by warming temperatures, might slow warming in the future.

Lake Toolik is above the Arctic Circle, about 350 miles south of the Arctic Ocean. The nine of us in the fellowship will be playing scientist while we're there, doing research in the field and then processing our samples and analyzing our findings back in the lab. The fellowship is run by the Marine Biological Lab, a research institution out of Woods Hole, Massachusetts that sends many scientists to Toolik each summer. MBL's goal for the fellowship is to educate journalists about polar science so we can do a better job of writing about it.

I'm planning to blog as frequently as possible about what we're seeing and learning, as well as my impressions of life at the camp and how it compares to McMurdo Station, Antarctica where I spent two summers as a science writer. (Click here to read my article on life at McMurdo from The American Scholar.) I'll also be blogging for Polar Field Notes, an arctic science newsletter put out by the company that runs the logistics at Toolik.