High Arctic tundra

So I work a lot on tree ring data throughout the Western United States, so what I do is I'll go out to the mountains, I'll c- take tree cores from trees, and I will use this data to use the ring widths in the trees to tell us something about reconstructions of past climates.

Now, sometimes this means I'm working on the last hundred, 200 years, sometimes on thousands of years, but then sometimes I also go up to the Canadian High Arctic, where I spend a lot of time working on mummified forests that died three to four million years ago, which can tell us about how ecosystems existed during time periods that were warmer than they are today, or at least about as warm as where we're heading.

And this is the value of paleoclimate data, really.

It is that to anticipate future changes, we need to understand how and why climates varied in the past, and what sorts of ecosystems both thrived but also did not thrive under those conditions.

There are no rats claimed.

For more than seven decades, residents of Alberta have shared something in common with Antarctica and the High Arctic.

All locations are officially free of rats.

But on Thursday, the Canadian province's reputation took a hit when the town of Bowdoin announced the discovery of a dead rat and called on the province's rat patrol to investigate.

I told you I was going to do it.

More than seven decades, 70 years, residents of Alberta, Canada, have something in common with Antarctica and the High Arctic.

They're officially free of rats.

They have no rats in Alberta.