Far North Science

Dr. Chris Wilson of NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center
holds a 38-inch ruler up to a giant shortraker rockfish
caught in the Bering Sea near the Pribilof Islands.
Credit: Karna McKinney/NOAA Fisheries

An immense goggle-eyed rockfish — possibly born in the 19th century during the age of sail — was caught deep in the Bering Sea and donated to astonished federal biologists at NOAA Fisheries.

The huge female shortraker rockfish — Sebastes borealis — was accidently trapped in mid-March during a trawl targeting pollock some 2,100 feet down in the black depths of Pribilof Canyon south of St. Paul Island by the catcher-processor Kodiak Enterprise of Trident SeaFoods, according to a release from Sheela MacLean at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Juneau.

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Tohru Saito passes a headwind-ducking Iditarod musher
while on a permafrost-observatory drilling trip
from Manley to St. Marys. Photo by Kenji Yoshikawa

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.

Traverses across the bumps of the frozen northern landscape are not easy, but two scientific teams I recently wrote about are cruising right along.

University of Alaska Fairbanks permafrost scientist Kenji Yoshikawa and his partner Tohru Saito of the International Arctic Research Center zipped through a trip down the Yukon River with two snowmachines and three sleds. They traveled from Manley Hot Springs to St. Marys in less than two weeks, installing permafrost-monitoring stations at Manley, Galena, Kaltag, Shageluk, Russian Mission, Marshall, and St. Marys. Along the way, they pulled off the trail for head-on passes with the top 10 Iditarod mushers near Eagle Island, and each put about 800 miles on his snowmachine.

“I really liked this trip,” Yoshikawa said when he returned to Fairbanks. “Every night and every day we met new people who helped us out.”

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Deline in winter 2006
Credit: Sahtu Monitoring Project

On the 20th day of their trek across the tundra of northern Canada, those intrepid explorers on the SnowSTAR 2007: Barrenlands Traverse have reached the remote village of Deline and entered the vast frozen expanse of one of the world’s seventh largest freshwater lake.

Great Bear Lake — Canada’s largest lake and North America’s fourth largest — stretches horizon to horizon, appearing as vast as a frozen sea. Natives have long called it Sahtu, a Dene Athabascan name for the North Slavey people who have lived along the lake for thousands of years.

“They will make a major ice crossing (April 5) into the Dease Arm,” reports basecamp manager Dave Andersen, in a new dispatch. “Looking Northeast from their hillside camp to tomorrow’s track, it is Great Bear Lake ice as far as you can see.”

With nightly temperatures often breaking Minus 20 F, the members of the expedition must struggle to make a satellite phone connection to upload their latest dispatches. Imagine the journey the bytes and bits must take — from a camp on Far North late winter tundra, via satellite, to a computer in Fairbanks and then into fiber optic and DSL lines to the world.

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The pink line shows the 1979–2000 average.
March 2007 ice extent is the solid off-white.
Land masses are green; water is dark blue.
Source: NSIDC Sea Ice Index

The maximum reach of Arctic sea ice during the 2007 winter was the second smallest since satellite coverage began, only 1.7 percent larger than minimum record set in March 2006, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The area of ocean covered with at least 15 percent ice was only 5.7 million square miles (14.7 million square kilometers) during March — compared to 5.6 million square miles seen in March 2006, said a NSIDC report published online this week.

Sea ice has been declining 5 to 7 percent per decade for a generation in a meltdown that has seen record or near record minimums every month since 2000. Scientists blame a combination of natural cycles, Arctic warming and dramatic shifts in ocean and air currents — old ice has been flushed out into the Atlantic and warm ocean water has pulsed north. (See FNS story Arctic ice: the shrink goes on for more details and sea ice links.)

“This year’s low wintertime extent is another milestone in a strong downward trend,” said NSIDC scientist Walt Meier. “We’re still seeing near-record lows and higher-than-normal temperatures. We expect the downward trend to continue in future years.”

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