Re-Connecting on the North Slope: NASA FORTE’s Summer 2025 Pre-Field Visit

Re-Connecting on the North Slope: NASA FORTE's Summer 2025 Pre-Field Visit

By the FORTE team

Olivia Frykman, Kyle Turner, Maria Tzortziou, Antonio Mannino, Phillip Toney, and Teresa Jacobsson contributed to this post.

In July 2025, NASA's Earth Venture Suborbital Mission FORTE (Frontlines of Rapidly Transforming Ecosystems) moved from planning to action on the North Slope of Alaska.

Lead principal investigator Maria Tzortziou of the City University of New York, alongside deputy principal investigator Antonio Mannino, both of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, brought their team to the remote Iñupiat community of the Native Village of Nuiqsut (NVN) along Alaska's northernmost coastline. The expedition group included NVN natural resources manager Phillip Toney, City University of New York research associate Kyle Turner, and Xylem Inc engineers Kyle Waits and Dan Hutcheson.

Investigating the rapidly changing Arctic land, rivers, and ocean requires measurements across multiple spatial scales. FORTE is uniquely structured to bridge these gaps by deploying a diverse array of observational platforms.

The team will integrate satellite data and airborne imagery from airplanes and drones with field observations from high-tech research vessels, small local boats, buoys, moorings, autonomous platforms, and helicopter deployments to remote locations. Over its planned four-year timeline (2026-2030), the mission aims to uncover the response of nearshore Arctic ecosystems-from lower watersheds to coastlines and adjacent seas-to changes in land-ocean fluxes, and to assess the implications for local marine resources, coastal communities, and industries, as well as their impact on larger-scale ocean processes.

Boots on the Ground

Upon arrival in Nuiqsut, the team focused on two immediate priorities. The first was installing FORTE's initial long-term environmental monitoring station in the Nechelik Channel, a major branch of the Colville River that flows beside the village. This installation marked the beginning of a multi-year, in situ dataset tracking river flow and water quality, critical data that has been severely lacking in this vulnerable region. The second priority was deepening relationships with community members, revisiting the mission's science objectives, and listening to firsthand accounts of how this rapidly changing landscape is affecting the lives of those most closely connected to it.

While this pre-campaign expedition successfully laid the groundwork for future data collection, it also reinforced a fundamental truth: understanding Arctic change depends just as much on trusted partnerships and local knowledge as it does on scientific instruments and satellites.

The Big Picture: Tracking Arctic Change from Land to Sea

With the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the global average, Alaska's North Slope has emerged as a critical focal point for environmental research. The region's expansive river networks-including the Colville, Kuparuk, Sagavanirktok, and Canning rivers-serve as vital arteries that drain vast expanses of the Arctic tundra and the Brooks Range before emptying into the Beaufort Sea,

The FORTE team will follow how these fluxes of materials, a complex mixture of freshwater, sediments, nutrients, and organic matter, travel from thawing landscapes into these rivers and eventually out to sea.

While in Nuiqsut, the team deployed specialized monitoring equipment in the Colville River Delta to capture real-time river flow and water quality parameters. Beyond installing these long-term instruments, the team met with the Native Village of Nuiqsut Tribal Council, City Council, and the Kuukpik Corporation to reintroduce the mission. The Native Village of Nuiqsut has supported FORTE since its 2022 proposal stage, remaining an active partner through project implementation. "Following the FORTE award, the project also helped support the tribe's decision to expand its internal natural resources capacity," noted NVN business manager Teresa Jacobsson. This collaborative dialogue enabled the research team to incorporate local knowledge into pre-campaign fieldwork and access planning during the summers of 2024 and 2025-a crucial foundation for the mission's primary field deployments in 2027 and 2028.

Science Begins on the Ground

Installing FORTE's first long-term monitoring station in the Colville River Delta proved more complicated than anticipated, a testament to just how unpredictable and dynamic Arctic rivers can be.

Before arriving in Nuiqsut, the team had identified a deployment site in the Nechelik Channel, based on prior scoping visits conducted in the summer of 2024. "By the time of the July 2025 trip, that site was gone," said Phillip Toney. "An unusually intense river ice breakup in June of 2025 had eroded several feet of shoreline, and once we reached the field, we had to find an entirely new location along the channel."

That erosion was part of a broader pattern: in June 2025, the North Slope experienced one of the latest seasonal river ice breakups on record. An abrupt rise in temperature in mid-June resulted in a combination of rapid, high-elevation snowmelt and significant river ice jams in the Colville River. Record flooding recorded by the U. S. Geological Survey at Umiat, 70 miles upstream, submerged the airstrip there just weeks before the FORTE team arrived in Nuiqsut in July 2025. While the new location in the Nechelik also exhibited unstable and quickly eroding conditions, it offered the best balance of river access and proximity to the road for installation of the FORTE instruments. The local knowledge brought by Nuiqsut partners was crucial to the team's success at every stage, from selecting the equipment's physical location to navigating the permitting process for setting up the new station.

The challenge of setting up the station underpins a central tenet of FORTE's methodology: no single observational approach is sufficient to understand Arctic environmental change. Satellite imagery provides an unparalleled view of interconnected environmental shifts across the vast Arctic landscape, but it cannot track day-to-day variability within a single river channel or explain, on its own, why localized conditions are shifting. Direct field observations fill these data gaps, while partnerships with local residents provide the historical and place-based context needed to interpret what researchers observe and to understand how these changes directly impact people and communities.

Once the Colville River Delta monitoring site was set up, the team deployed two instruments to continuously track river conditions throughout the summer of 2025. Together these systems record water flow, temperature, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, dissolved organic matter, and algae levels, creating a running record of river dynamics from summer up to the fall freeze-up.

This continuous record proved its value almost immediately. In late August 2025, just weeks after deployment, the station measured a record flooding event that dramatically altered river flow and water quality, an anomalous high discharge that, as Phillip Toney described it, "caught even the local community completely by surprise." Local observations pointed to a remote cause: heavy rainfall across the Brooks Range combined with late-season snow and ice melt, rather than local precipitation.

That event coincided with a multi-day storm system that dropped four to six inches of rain across parts of Northwest Alaska and the Brooks Range foothills, with isolated totals as high as eight inches, leading to major flooding well beyond the Colville. Earlier in July, the Umiat USGS gauge-the river's sole long-term monitoring station upstream-had gone offline. As a result, FORTE's newly installed sensors served as the only ground-based instruments capturing the river's hydrologic response during and after the record flood. Data from the ground-based flowmeter at Nuiqsut revealed an extended high-flow anomaly, with water levels remaining elevated well into October 2025. While analysis continues, the event provided an early, concrete example of why ongoing monitoring is so valuable in this region, where significant environmental shifts occur long after a field team packs up and heads home.

While the deployment of the monitoring station marks a milestone for FORTE, it represents just one small component of the mission's broader strategy. Paired with airborne observations, satellite remote sensing, and ecosystem modeling, in the future more intensive in situ measurements will help researchers trace the movement of water, carbon, nutrients, and sediment from Arctic landscapes through river corridors and out into the coastal Arctic Ocean.

Building the Mission with Community

The FORTE team's connection with the Nuiqsut community led to a discussion that covered a wide range of issues currently shaping daily life in the region. Community members raised concerns about thawing permafrost, shifting river channels, deteriorating water quality, and impacts on subsistence fishing, hunting, and fish health. Erosion within and along the banks of the Colville River and its channels has increased water turbidity, shifting the delta's channels from lower turbidity and a dark blue-green color in late summer to an increasingly turbid, brown-colored system. This erosion has significantly impacted local subsistence hunting and fishing. Community members also described concerns that recent erosion at Cross Island, the village's historic whaling base, may be affecting bowhead whale movement and increasing bowhead vulnerability to orca predation, creating new challenges for Nuiqsut's subsistence whaling efforts. Currently, whaling efforts have been further hindered by increasingly volatile weather, such as extreme late-summer storms, elevated river and sea temperatures, and uncharacteristically cool July periods.

These local observations closely align with broader trends documented across Alaska's North Slope over recent decades. Coastal erosion, for instance, has accelerated along portions of the Beaufort Sea coast as declining sea ice, warmer ocean temperatures, and longer open-water seasons leave shorelines more exposed to intense wave action and storm surges. Recent research determined that erosion rates fluctuate considerably within a single season, underscoring how dynamic Arctic coastlines have become. A University of Alaska Fairbanks study that tracked six decades of aerial and satellite imagery found bluff erosion rates of up to 3.5 meters per year at sites along the Colville River near Nuiqsut. In interviews conducted as part of the same study, the majority of Nuiqsut residents reported that the rate of erosion had accelerated within their lifetime.

These parallels demonstrate how local knowledge anchors broader trends to specific, lived realities. Community members described critical dynamics that physical instruments alone cannot capture: how shifts in river conditions compromise safe travel routes, and how coastal instability alters traditional hunting and fishing grounds. Connecting scientific measurements with generational experience points researchers toward vital ecological anomalies that require closer investigation as the mission advances. "The July 2025 pre-campaign expedition highlighted that successful Arctic research demands an integrated, adaptive approach," noted Maria Tzortziou. "It requires a cross-disciplinary framework where continuous high-tech monitoring and deep local partnerships merge and adapt together in real-time."

Looking Ahead

While FORTE's core scientific questions remain open, the preliminary groundwork laid during the summer of 2025-built upon the initial visit a year prior and strengthened by a follow-up data collection trip in 2026-provided the team with practical experience, trusted partnerships, and field infrastructure necessary for a long-term collaborative research effort. Over the coming seasons, researchers will draw on field measurements, airborne campaigns, satellite remote sensing, and ecosystem modeling to expand observations across Alaska's North Slope.

That same collaborative spirit runs through the recently selected FORTE science team. While one investigator focuses on river hydrology, another studies carbon cycling, and others work in remote sensing or coastal processes. Through navigating different disciplines and questions, the same core mission remains: uncovering how changes on land, in rivers, and along the coast connect to one another. No single dataset can tell the whole story, and FORTE's real value lies in bringing these different angles together. As the mission prepares for its planned primary field deployments in 2027 and 2028, researchers will continue to build upon this collaborative foundation, ensuring that upcoming airborne flights and intensive in situ campaigns remain deeply connected to the realities of Alaska's North Slope.

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