A Major Climate Force Has Been Ignored for Decades
Finding a vole on Alaska’s North Slope takes practice. The open plain pulls the eye upward, toward grand things: the horizon line, the distant shimmer of snow in the mountains. The nearest tree is more than 50 miles away. The low shrubs and sedges toss and wave in the wind. It’s a place where a 600-pound musk ox can look dog-size. In this landscape, even a very large vole—weighing less than three ounces and no more than nine inches long—is easy to miss. But Nick Patel knows what to look for. Last August, Patel pointed my attention toward a depression worn into the moss, a path that disappeared into a yellowed tuft of sedge. Voles are creatures of habit, scurrying so often over the same route that they wear trails—runways—into the soil. Once you know to look for them, the tundra is laced through with vole runways. Patel is a field tech with Team Vole, a group of some 20 researchers studying Alaska’s voles and lemmings. Despite their size, these creatures are a force on …
