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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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