This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Emily Schweng.

When you look at satellite images, it's easy to pick out hurricanes, deserts, and the work of a certain semi-aquatic rodent.

And the reason you can see beaver activity from space is because they leave a mark on the landscape.

Kentape is an Arctic Ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

So they make these ponds and when a pond forms, my idea was that, you know, we could, we could

infer if it was a certain kind of ponds and we could see a Beaver Dam, then we could infer

that, you you know beavers

had moved into that area or moved out of that area if it's a beaver pond that's drained.

Tape and a team of other scientists used Landsat satellite images that cover more than

19,000 square kilometers of Arctic Tundra in Alaska.

We saw lots of new Beaver Ponds. I think we saw 56 new Beaver Ponds formed between 1999 and 2014.

Beavers are considered keystone species, which have an outsized effect on their ecosystem.

And I think it's particularly true in the Arctic because it's underlain by all this frozen ground.

He's talking about permafrost.

And what happens is when you start flooding permafrost areas,

permafrost starts to deteriorate,

and you know, really the glue that's binding the soil together,

that's holding a landscape together,

starts to thaw.

Tape and colleagues presented their findings December 11th of the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union.

He says the implications of beavers northward expansion are big.

Imagine that you just dropped 56 groundwater springs into Arctic stream environments, right?

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