Far North Science

Shishmaref eroding fast
Shishmaref Relocation Coalition

Shrinking sea ice. Coastal erosion. Warming permafrost. Greening tundra. Burning forests. Shifts of marine mammals and fish that will make it harder to gather food.

Such climate change may threaten daily life in rural Alaska more than any other place in America. As a result, more than 145 Native villages and other tribal groups have now signed a petition urging President Bush and Congress to take immediate action to help slow climate warming in the Arctic, said Anna Davidson, an organizer of the drive.

The petitions call for “a national, mandatory program to reduce climate change pollution and promote the development and adoption of renewable energy within a timeframe that prevents irreversible harm to public health, the economy and the environment.”

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Alaska Science Forum is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

A Compton tortoiseshell butterfly
Credit: ASF / Ken Philip

Ants—Ken Philip says ants aren’t really the muscle-bound insects people trump them up to be. And he should know. Philip and his helpers have built up a vast collection of northern butterflies that will someday belong to the Smithsonian Institution. He called to dispel the notion that the mighty ant’s strength is superior to yours. The myth is born, no doubt, from people seeing ants carrying objects bigger than they are. But tiny humans would be even stronger than ants, Philip said.

“The strength of a muscle is equal to its cross-sectional area,” Philip said. “The weight of an animal is proportional to the cube of its linear size and the strength is proportional to the square. If you reduced a human by a factor of 200, about the size of an ant, he could lift 200 times his own weight. A human being the size of an ant could lift a scaled-down tractor-trailer.”

Lynx—Yoram Yom-Tov of the Zoology Department of Tel Aviv University in Israel recently measured 555 lynx skulls at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. He wanted to see if a warmer Alaska affected the size of lynx. Instead, he found something else.

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Inupiat hunter butchers a caribou
NOAA Photo Library

Scientists investigating climate and biology in Alaska and the Arctic have slowly discovered a reservoir of essential background knowledge — the observations from Native residents.

Listening to the people who gather food on the land and sea opens a door on past conditions and can help put the present into perspective, according to an news story that appeared recently in the journal of Science.

Certainly, scientists must be careful with anecdotes and be alert to bias, the article points out. But with a satellite record only 30 years old, and other data going back only a few generations, tapping Native memory has become an ingenious tool for extending research into climate change, sea ice, storm tracks, marine mammal populations, fish runs, bird migration and vegetation shifts.

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The frozen Beaufort Sea
NOAA Photo Library

The grinding, crackling ice of the Arctic Ocean never stops moving, not even in the grip of polar winter.

As this ice “rides on the ocean, absorbing energy from the circumpolar weather systems,” it often buckles and ruptures like a series of cataclysmic earthquakes, according to a release from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

These “ice quakes” can rip open leads to expose the sea. Returning floes can collide with inexorable force, then splinter into ridges as tall as buildings. All this frigid violence may be regular life on a frozen sea. But what will happen now that the ice cap has been thinning and shrinking — setting minimum-extent records nearly every month since 2000?

“These continuous ice quakes result in open leads of water or mountainous ridges of broken, jumbled ice,” scientists say. “These deformations, in turn, may have an effect on the thickness and durability of the arctic ice pack in the face of climate change.”

Will ice quakes quicken Arctic warming by exposing the dark ocean to solar radiation? Or will the jumbled mass of ridge and ivotuk armor the sea against meltdown?

Over the next few weeks, researcher Jennifer Hutchings of the UAF International Arctic Research Center will lead a team of scientists at the U.S. Navy Beaufort Sea ice camp in an investigation of ice stress, ice movement, and the overall mass of sea ice.

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Salmon Shark
NOAA-AFSC

Scientists will tackle the mysteries of Bering Sea sharks and the decline of northern fur seals with studies funded by the Pollock Conservation Cooperative Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The center, underwritten largely by the pollock fishing industry but supervised by the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, awarded $300,000 in new grants for research into marine life off Alaska’s vast coast.

In pursuit of abundant walleye pollock in the Bering Sea, fishermen inadvertently catch the groundfish’s predators in the same trawls: salmon sharks and sleeper sharks. This bycatch ranges between 400 and 1,400 metric tons per season.

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Far North taiga
Credit: SnowStar 2007

The SnowSTAR 2007: Barrenlands Traverse skirted one of the Far North’s mysteries: The Mad Trapper of Rat River.

In the hard winter of ‘31, Albert Johnson just wanted to be left alone when Royal Canadian Mounted Police visited his shack on the Rat River in the Yukon Territory. But when he refused to answer questions about whether he was vandalizing rival traps, and shot and wounded a Mountie, the Canadian police returned and blew up the cabin with dynamite.

The Mad Trapper of Rat River emerged from a foxhole in the cabin floor with his rifle blazing.

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A raggedy mound of dirty sidewalk snow outside my Anchorage house began to melt for the first time today, marking the first official afternoon to rise above 32 degrees in 52 days.

Over the weekend, four of us skied 20 miles through the Chugach Mountains in malodorous polypro. The snow bridges held, and the sun blazed down, and my clothes grew wet with sweat. But I still stuffed a hat in my crotch to block the wind in the pass.

These are signs. We’ve reached the cusp of spring here in Southern Alaska, probably only a week or two from true breakup and ankle-deep mud. But we don’t need melt and long days to signal the changing season.

The spring outdoor gear catalogs are arriving by the pound.

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Barrow whalers distribute bowhead
meat to the community
Credit: NOAA Fisheries

Global warming could deliver new diseases, more contaminants, crushing stress and dangerous temperature extremes to rural Alaska and other small communities across the Arctic, according to a panel of Alaskans involved with assessing climate impact on health.

“Every day, as we know, news reports provide more evidence of the consequences of global warming from around the planet,” said Pam Miller, an organizer of the teleconference and executive director of Alaska Community Action on Toxics. “We also know that the arctic is warming faster than other parts of the world, accompanied by melting permafrost, thinning sea ice, increasing storm surges and coastal erosion. … Some Alaska coastal communities are facing disruption and expensive relocation.”

Most vulnerable will be the residents of rural villages, most of them Natives and First Nations people, who rely on subsistence food and local resources to make a living.

When contaminants get transported to the North on changing air and ocean currents, they end up in the food chain and migrate meal to meal into the bodies of people. When animal populations crash in number or shift to new habitat, local people must spend more time and resources to gather food.

“They are the most highly dependent subsistence population in the world,” said Dr. James Berner, science director in the Division of Community Health of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. “It is one of those areas where the changing climate has a direct daily impact on the lives of the people who live in it.”

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