Far North Science

Late-forming sea ice exposed Shishmaref
to erosion during a 2004 fall storm
Shishmaref Relocation Coalition

The drumbeat of climate change information continues to roll, with lots of details about shifting conditions in Alaska and the Arctic. The full text of the first chapter of Climate Change 2007 — Physical Science Basis — has now been posted online by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The index includes the Summary for Policy Makers that made headlines worldwide on Feb. 7. Scientists called evidence of global warming “unequivocal,” with human greenhouse gas emissions “very likely” the main driver.

Read on » » » »

National Climate Data Center

Have you been hearing commentators and politicians declare that most scientists still don’t agree on global warming? (Completely untrue.)

Or that a little thicker blanket of carbon dioxide blanket will simply tickle the corn higher and trees greener? (As if.) Or that these reports calling global warming “unequivocal” are based on “junk science”? (Thank Alaska Republican legislators for that one.)

Or maybe you’ve caught snatches of more technical illuminations that seem to prove Al Gore has taken an anti-American economy plunge into raving hysteria. Things like — the Greenland ice cap has been expanding not shrinking. The Arctic melt has actually stopped (since it was so cold in Alaska in February.) Most warming took place before 1948. Most warming stopped in 1998. It was way warmer during the Medieval Upper Permian Fern Dry Spell and that proves, of course, that there’s nothing to worry about.

And you think it’s emissions from people? What a hoot. It’s the Sun, Stupid!

Well, there’s a new antidote to such conservative disinformation.

Read on » » » »

A robin at Westchester Lagoon
in Anchorage in spring 2005
Credit: Donna Dewhurst / FWS

Trees bare. Grass flattened and brown. The creek swollen to its bank. The remaining snow gone rotten and slushy. Morning light that hits at 5. Squishy mystery goo underfoot.

And the first solitary robin singing from the peak of a cottonwood tree. He called repeatedly at 6 a.m. — at once a melodic claim for real estate, the tuneful call to battle and an offer to make more robins.

I grabbed the binoculars and spied its silhouette against the gray sky, 100 yards off, clearly visible amid the bony branches that still lack buds.

These signs of spring have been emerging from breakup in our patch of East Anchorage. It’s the weeks between snow and mud, when the spruce-birch forest along Chester Creek takes a long inhale before the explosive sprint into the summer jungle. But they’re not alone.

Read on » » » »

Crossing a lead
The Arctic Arc

Two Belgium explorers on a mission to measure snow depths across the Arctic Ocean ice pack trudged up to the North Pole on April 24, after traveling on foot from the remote north coast of Siberia almost 578 miles in 54 days, according to a dispatch on the expedition website.

After their final exhausting 13-hour ordeal pulling their sleds through drifts, Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer reached the Earth’s boreal crown at 6:30 p.m. GMT ( 10:30 a.m. in Alaska.)

Since leaving Severnaya Zemlya off Siberia at the end of February, the two men had averaged almost 11 miles per day on the first leg of The Arctic Arc. They now face a 500-mile slog to the coast of Greenland for a second leg.

In the end, if they reach their goal of the southern tip of Greenland in June, they will have traveled on foot an unprecedented 2,700 miles.

Read on » » » »

A sign warning trail users of a small
glacier in a Fairbanks yard.
Photo by Ned Rozell.

This column 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.

On late winter nights in the Goldstream Valley north of Fairbanks this past winter, a woman named Hilary went for walks on the snow-covered trail outside her house. During a time of year when silence dominates, she heard something strange–the sound of running water.

Water was percolating up through the ice of nearby Goldstream Creek, and flowing in fan-like channels over the ice. Not long after it hit the surface, the water froze. Ice accumulated over the days until it created a small glacier that crept to within a few feet of a woodpile on Hilary’s porch. At about the same time, water began seeping into the first story of her house.

“I’m someone who appreciates nature, but there’s a certain line where what’s beautiful and awesome becomes a threat,” Hilary said.

Read on » » » »

As earthquakes go, this one was just powerful enough to interrupt a good sleep. The compressional wave passed through my bed at 2:36 a.m with the irritating force of a cat leaping into the covers from the floor.

Read on » » » »

Bering Strait from Space
Credit: NOAA

An AP story detailing the discussion in Moscow over the latest Alaskan Mega Dream — the $65 billion railroad tunnel under the Bering Strait — contained another one of those atlas-impaired goofs that appear so often in stories about the Far North.

First, we’ll set aside a few issues for later — like the wisdom of spending more than twice the cost of the Apollo moon shot (OK, that was in 1969 dollars, so sue me), or the impact of traversing one of Alaska’s most ecologically sensitive regions with thousands of workers and machines and ships. Or the question of where you might dispose of all the gunk dredged up from ocean floor.

In many ways, the story by Alex Nicholson about the conference “Megaprojects of Russia’s East” begins promisingly enough.

For more than a century, entrepreneurs and engineers have dreamed of building a tunnel connecting the eastern and western hemispheres under the Bering Strait — only to be brought up short by war, revolution and politics.

Now die-hard supporters are renewing their push for the audacious plan — a $65 billion highway project that would link two of the world’s most inhospitable regions by burrowing under a stretch of water connecting the Pacific and Arctic oceans.

But later, when the story described the conditions at the Bering Strait, we find an unlikely bit of data.

The proposed 68-mile tunnel would be the longest in the world. It would also be the linchpin for a 3,700-mile railroad line stretching from Yakutsk – the capital of a gold- and mineral-rich Siberian region roughly the size of India – through extreme northeastern Russia and waters up to 180 feet deep and into the western coast of Alaska. Winter temperatures there have hit minus 94.

Minus 94?

Read on » » » »

Pod of narwhals, August 2005
Credit: Kristin Laidre / NOAA Ocean Explorer

Want a taste of ocean one mile down in Baffin Strait?

Want to measure climate change in a habitat too dark, too cold and too alien for humans to ever visit in person?

Why, you enlist the narwhals — those intelligent marine unicorns that eat up bottom fish during some of the deepest dives ever taken by Arctic whales.

“We’ve converted these animals into oceanographers,” said University of Washington biologist Kristin Laidre in an intriguing story published last week in the Seattle Times.

The narwhal, related to beluga whales, have always been difficult to study and hard to catch. Males (and some females) grow an elongated, spiraled tooth from their upper jaws. European royalty considered it magical, as though from the unicorn, though its real function remains a mystery.

Read on » » » »