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| Chien-Lu Ping, left, and Gary Michaelson on the Arctic Coast during a soil sampling trip. |
Gary Michaelson’s ties with the Matanuska Experiment Farm run deep. His father, Neil Michaelson, was an Agricultural Research Service (ARS) soil scientist at the farm and his maternal grandfather, William Sweetman, started the dairy-breeding program there in the 1940s —and stayed for 46 years. Michaelson’s family and grandparents lived in Palmer, but, he says, “I kind of grew up at the experiment station.”
After ARS pulled out of Palmer in the late 1960s,
Michaelson’s family moved to Arizona, but he spent summers with his
grandparents, working on the farm grounds crew and with agronomist Bill
Mitchell on research related to the revegetation of roads developed for early North
Slope oil exploration. After graduating from college in 1975, he worked as a
lab technician at the Plant and Soil Analysis Laboratory for four years before
going to graduate school in Iowa. While working on his master’s degree, he spent
summers at the lab and returned to the farm full-time in 1982 as a
researcher for the High Latitude Soils Program.
On May 12, the university will recognize Michaelson for 35
years of service, but if you add in the earlier years, he has worked at the
farm well over 40 years. He will retire from the university May 31.
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| David Weindorf, left, and Gary Michaelson take a core sample. |
Michaelson enrolled in college expecting to study medical
technology, but he switched to soils and agriculture as a sophomore. “I was
always interested in science,” he said. “I also realized that I wanted to work
outdoors.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in agricultural chemistry and
soils from University of Arizona and a master’s degree in soil fertility from
Iowa State University. For his master’s project, he studied the effects of
nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium on barley and bromegrass grown on a newly cleared
Delta Agricultural Project tract. When he went left for graduate school, the
land in Delta was just being cleared.
Michaelson values his 30-year collaboration with soils Professor Chien-Lu Ping,
who retired last December. “We worked
together on everything, he said. “My strength was the lab and his was the
field.”
They worked together in the field over the summers and he worked
in the lab during the winters analyzing the soil samples and data. Over the
years, he has worked on a variety of soils projects, studying the properties of
volcanic soil, the soil fertility for the Delta and Point MacKenzie agricultural
projects, carbon storage in arctic and subarctic soils, carbon flux in arctic
soils and the properties of Interior Alaska’s black spruce soils.
Altogether, he published 17 peer-reviewed journal articles
as the lead author and was listed as coauthor on twice that number.
Each project he worked on was different, he said. It was
like getting a new job continually. “I enjoyed it all, really,” he says.
Michaelson feels that together, he and Ping made a significant contribution to
the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service soils database, particularly
for arctic soils. Before they started that work in the 1990s, there were only a
few soil data points in the Arctic. Now there are well over 100. For each site,
they dug into the permafrost, made detailed descriptions and measured soil
properties, nutrients and carbon storage, sometimes participating in large
interdisciplinary projects that lasted years. The database is used to develop
projections on how climate change will affect the release of carbon stored in
frozen soils. He said it was also satisfying that the results of their work
were published so others can use their research.
Speaking from his home in Florida, Ping describes Michaelson
as a dedicated and able researcher who also helped with the logistics of their
work. “He was pretty indispensible in the operation,” he said. Ping notes that
a 1996 journal article written by Michaelson is one of the most-cited journal articles
on the subject of carbon storage and distribution in tundra soils. The paper
has been cited more than 130 times in other journal articles.
Ping also notes that Michaelson worked as a technical
advisor to the lab over the last 30 years. He compiled the lab manual, advised
the lab tech on methodology, instrument calibration and troubleshooting. He has
also helped the faculty teach the lab section of soil chemistry.
After he retires, Michaelson plans to stay in Palmer. He may
continue some working on some projects with Ping, but he hopes to get out and
do more things, such as traveling to Australia with his family to visit friends
and family there. He also wants to do more hiking, kayaking, biking and other
outdoor activities.
