Far North Science

Caribou along the trail
SnowStar Traverse

The determined explorers of the SnowSTAR 2007: Barrenlands Traverse — now on the 39th day of their 1,800 mile traverse across Alaska and far northern Canada — this weekend reached one of the Far North’s weirdest ecological anomalies: the Thelon Oasis.

It’s a patch of dense spruce forest that has somehow thrived in one of the harshest and most barren habitats on Earth.

“SnowSTAR accomplished a major goal today by reaching the Thelon River, which they will follow all the way to their finish in Baker Lake,” wrote basecamp manager Dave Andersen.

“They are now back in dense spruce trees — the famous Thelon Oasis. These trees will be with them for about the next two or three days and then they will be returned to the rocky and windswept barrenlands.”

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It’s one of those enduring cartoon myths: Hordes of fur-ball lemmings scrabble from the windswept tundra over some cliff into the sea. Call it rodenticide in response to food stress. Or maybe just a gerbilian version of cabin fever: another critter gone mad during the long dark.

Collared Lemming
Credit: Don Reid/Wildlife Conservation Society

Of course, lemmings don’t commit mass suicide. (This idiotic bit of lore may have originated in a staged scene for a 1958 Walt Disney film called White Wilderness). But the tiny relatives of voles — an anchor of the food chain in far northern ecosystems — do sometimes migrate in large groups during food shortages.

Subsisting on vegetation and seeds and shoots, these 1-ounce to 4-ounce rodents live within the Arctic tundra’s vegetative mat by the uncounted millions, building a maze of raceways and tunnels. Once covered by winter snow, they carve out a subnivian world, warmer than the surface and hidden from most predators.

What happens if climate change builds this snowy ceiling later in the year or removes it earlier in spring? What if periods of melt locks food sources in ice?

Are lemmings poised to rush off the “climate change cliff?” Canadian scientist Don Reid plans to investigate in a project for the International Polar Year.

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2005 sea ice record
Credit: NSIDC

Sea ice failed to rebound this winter in the Arctic Ocean, closing out the annual floe-forming season with the second-smallest extent ever recorded in March.

Now a team of Colorado forecasters give one-in-three odds that sea ice will shrink to the smallest extent ever by September 2007, continuing a meltdown that has seen record or near-record coverage just about every month for nearly a decade.

The newest Pan-Arctic Forecast says there’s a 33 percent chance the sea ice extent will shrink below 2.1 million square miles and break the record set in 2005.

And it’s almost certain — they give it a probability of about 70 percent — that the area capped with ice will be among the bottom five seasons since reliable satellite monitoring began 30 years ago, according to release posted online this week.

Shrinking sea ice has become a major harbinger of Arctic climate change and it seems to be accelerating, due to warming temperatures combined with shifts in air and ocean currents. As the dark ocean absorbs more solar energy instead of reflecting it back into space, the meltdown goes even faster, endangering polar bears, seals and other species that depend on the ice as habitat.

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Tagging a beluga in Cook Inlet near Anchorage
Credit: NMML

The isolated and ever dwindling beluga whales of Cook Inlet — one of the smallest distinct populations of marine mammals on the planet — should be listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act, NOAA Fisheries announced Thursday (April 19).

Only about 300 of the intelligent fish-eating whales roam the silt-saturated tidal arms of upper Cook Inlet near Alaska’s urban center — a 75 percent drop from 1,300 animals estimated only three decades ago. Biologists concluded the whales have a one in four chance of going extinct within 100 years, according to an official status review released in December.

The nine-page proposal, published in the Federal Register, will undergo a year-long review with public comment before written into law, modified or rejected by the agency.

Expect battle lines. Previous attempts to list the whales have landed in the Alaska Supreme Court. This time, the issue will trigger emotional arguments about whether human activity near Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, has damaged a unique whale population isolated from its species since the end of the ice age.

The plight of the whales will also raise troubling questions about federal priorities. While more than $120 million has been spent investigating the biology of Steller sea lions in Alaska, the National Marine Fisheries Service has barely enough money to pay for a spring count of Cook Inlet belugas. No one knows enough about their ecology, family groups, winter diet, critical habitat and response to humans to explain why the whales have failed to rebound.

“Funding is minimal,” one federal biologist said.

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Needles still cling to this young,
live tamarack in Fairbanks.
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.

The tamarack is one of Alaska’s prettiest and most endangered trees. An insect outbreak in the past decade killed up to 80 percent of the adult trees in the state and scientists are keeping an eye on tamaracks to see if they’ll need to resort to “genetic conservation,” removing small trees from the forest so some will exist in the future.

Tamaracks are trees that look like spruce, but they have cones that sit upright on supple branches. Unlike spruce trees, tamaracks drop their needles every fall. When autumn arrives, tamarack needles change from green to gold before shedding like a dog’s fur onto the forest floor. Each spring, new green needles emerge like the legs of spiders from branch nodules. Tamaracks grow on boggy ground in valleys of the Koyukuk, Yukon, Tanana, and Kuskokwim river drainages and foresters say the wood is similar to birch in terms of heating value per cord.

Starting in the early 1990s, the larch sawfly started attacking tamaracks over the entire range of the tree, more than one million square acres. By 1996, the sawfly infested almost every tamarack in Alaska, gobbling up the solar panels the tree uses for nourishment.

“It’s a losing battle for the tree when you have that many consecutive years of being hammered like that,” former U.S. Forest Service Entomologist Ed Holsten said in 1996. “Combine that with the trees growing at the extreme end of their range, and it’s hard to recover.”

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Larch sawfly larva
Credit: USFS

You might blame climate change. Seasons with deep insulating snow that keep the iron cold from freezing the bugs overwintering in the duff. Or maybe it’s the dry, hot summers, when sawflies and beetles and leaf miners fatten on the trees.

Such shifting patterns supposedly triggered the spruce bark beetle epidemic, wiping out a couple million acres of white spruce across southern Alaska. Maps showing vast stands of brown snags on the Kenai Peninsula now serve as climate change icons.

This era of insect has spread like sunburn throughout urban Anchorage, where summers have warmed slightly over the past 50 years and nursery stock has seeded the town with invasive pests. The birch go brown by August with alien leaf mining larva that arrived without any natural predators (though federal entomologists have seeded a city park with a predatory wasp.) Woolly chewers crawl the alder. Aphids flitter like green dandruff. And my solitary Larch — a luminous green giant in mid-summer that glows like gold each fall — has been invested by little green worms.

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WHOI researchers Kris Newhall, Rick
Krishfield and John Kemp assemble a tripod
to deploy the sensor beneath the ice.
Credit: Chris Linder /WHOI

Want to fathom the heat hidden within the cryosphere’s inland sea?

Then you must penetrate the North Pole itself.

Researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution traveled this week to an ice station on the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska to begin eavesdropping on the mysterious, life-rich ocean layers beneath the floes.

The goal of this frigid game of peek-beneath-the-ice will be to deploy two instrument-packed buoys for an extraordinary trans-polar tour.

Over the next few weeks, WHOI Arctic research specialist Rick Krishfield and engineering assistant Kris Newhall will lead a team that will lodge the buoys in the ice — one at the North Pole (90 ° North) and the other two degrees south — and then leave them to drift for up to three years.

Rick Krishfield

The task will be a big step toward monitoring the Arctic Ocean on a large scale, where a fleet of autonomous buoys will measure the marine world a half-mile deep and then use satellite phones to send daily reports to scientists snug and warm inside the labs far away.

The researchers want to find out “how the waters in the upper layers of the Arctic Ocean — which insulate surface ice from warmer, deeper waters — are changing from season to season and year to year as global climate fluctuates,” according to a WHOI news release posted on-line this week.

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Less snow. More warmth. Strange rain. The global climate has continued to push limits during the first quarter of 2007, extending a warm pattern that began last fall.

NCDC

The Earth experienced the second warmest January-to-March period since 1880, ending a winter season that saw some of the highest average temperatures on record, according to a new report released April 17 by the National Climate Data Center.

Though certain regions (like Alaska) chilled below average toward the end of the winter, March temperatures simmered up in the contiguous United States, Europe, Brazil and most of Asia to close out the warm winter.

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