Far North Science

Male Alaska three-spine stickleback
Credit: Jeffrey S. McKinnon / NSF

They thrive in hundreds of Far North lakes and streams. They even travel into the ocean and move to new drainages. Three-spine sticklebacks may be smaller than your little finger, yet they’re one of the most successful fish in the Arctic. Scientists have long studied them for clues to ongoing evolution and species formation.

And here’s a secret. Examine sticklebacks from the same lake or drainage, and you’ll notice differences among the individual fish. Although they forage in the same water, they’ve learned to survive on different food sources, hiding in unique locales, occupied different ecological niches.

A team of scientists has uncovered one trigger: Sticklebacks eat their young.

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Newtok is surrounded by water
Credit: Jennifer Payne

The New York Times has published another story on the impact of climate change on people in the Far North, this time calling attention to the slow-moving environmental catastrophe undercutting houses and boardwalks within the Yup’ik village of Newtok.

Unfortunately, once again, the NYTs has misstated some climate warming facts and missed completely a subtlety that makes the Newtok situation even more egregious.

The story, Victim of Climate Change, a Town Seeks a Lifeline, does a good job of describing some of the basic challenges facing the village in its quest to find resources to move to a new location on higher ground of Nelson Island.

But the NYT committed at least one major goof and leaves out details about the village’s progress. Let’s begin where reporter William Yardley trots out the old boiler-plate permafrost-is-melting factoid.

The earth beneath much of Alaska is not what it used to be. The permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which Newtok and so many other Native Alaskan villages rest, is melting, yielding to warming air temperatures and a warming ocean.

What a well-crafted sentence! If only its premise were true. Unfortunately, widespread melting of permafrost has not occurred, and Newtok’s problem, while exceptionally dire, didn’t occur due to warming climate.

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A pod of narwhals
NOAA Ocean Explorer

The difficult issue of Arctic warming may simmer beneath the surface of the 59th meeting of the International Whaling Commission, this week in downtown Anchorage, the Hotel Captain Cook, from May 28 to 31.

The international body will be discussing whale management and research, Japanese proposals to ramp up a commercial harvest, and subsistence whaling quotas for Alaska and Siberian Natives. But the forecast of vast changes to the marine world will haunt these issues.

A new report by biologists at the World Wildlife Fund and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society says narwhals, belugas and bowhead whales could be driven from their habitats by ship traffic, endure food shortages and be disrupted by by changes in sea ice as warming overtakes their Arctic environment.

Whales in hot water? — published this week online — examines how rising sea temperatures, decreasing salinity, disintegrating floes in some areas, thicker ice in Baffin Strait and shifts in available food might undercut the health of whale populations.

As sea levels change and the ocean becomes more acidic, temperate and tropical cetaceans may be forced to seek new habitats. “Climate change could also be the nail in the coffin for the last 300 or so endangered North Atlantic right whales, as the survival of their calves has been directly related to the effects of climate variability on prey abundance,” added a news release about the report.

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Caribou bull
Credit: John Nickles-USFWS

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.

Thirty-five years ago, an Army helicopter pilot flying over a tundra plateau saw a group of caribou. Thinking something looked weird, he circled for a closer look. The animals, dozens of them, were dead.

The pilot reported what he saw to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The caribou, 48 adults and five calves, were lying in a group. The way their carcasses rested showed no signs that the animals had been running from a predator.

As word spread of the 53 dead caribou, people speculated what might have killed them: Nerve gas, toxic waste or some other dark secret from the Army post nearby, flying saucers, maybe a lightning strike?

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game sent wildlife disease specialist Ken Neiland to the site, about 33 miles southwest of Delta Junction. Glenn Shaw, a young atmospheric scientist from the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, went with him. Shaw had studied lightning before.

From the air, the scientists saw a clue to the animals’ death, a giant “Lichtenberg figure” etched into the ground near the carcasses. A Lichtenberg figure is a pattern of cracks extending from a central bullseye.

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Dixie pulling the sled

Open water. Towering ice blocks. Ragged crevasses. Shifting floes.

Two Belgium explorers struggling toward Greenland on an expedition to measure snow depths across the Arctic Ocean have stumbled into hellish conditions within the Ultima Thule of the Far North. But they keep trudging forward.

Since leaving the North Pole on April 26 on a 500-mile traverse toward land, Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer have been crossing what may be most inaccessible and least visited territory on Earth.

“The blocks we are encountering can measure anything up to three or four metres (10-13ft) high!” Hubert said in a May 24 dispatch by satellite phone. “And Dixie, who was pushing from the back would begin to shout and coax with each effort, as though he were driving a beast of burden with me being the beast up in front who had to obey each injunction.”

The explorers have fallen behind schedule. Their technical team has consulted satellite images and advised them to alter their route more to the east as a way to cut almost 200 miles from their route. Unless they can move faster, they will not reach shorefast ice rimming Greenland.

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Belugas swimming off Anchorage
Credit: NMML

Here’s a question thousands of people are pondering: Should we declare a dwindling population of beluga whales in Cook Inlet to be endangered under federal law?

Or should we avoid the hassle and expense of the Endangered Species Act and rely instead on the less stringent Marine Mammal Protection Act to help the whales recover?

This genetically isolated population has been declining about 4 percent each year and numbers about 300 — a 70 percent decline since the 1970s. The animals never mingle with other Alaska beluga stocks and could disappear within a century if conditions don’t change. Though overhunting in the early 1990s helped trigger the crisis, no one knows why the whales continue to slip.

With three weeks before the June 19 deadline for comments, almost 28,000 people have sent emails urging NOAA Fisheries to list the whales under the ESA. Most of the messages came from the pre-formatted make-a-comment feature on conservation websites. But another 100 people and groups submitted detailed personal comments, according to NOAA Fishieries spokeswoman Sheela McLean. They haven’t been analyzed yet.

Meanwhile, the agency has started ramping up for what may become the busiest research season in several years.

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Captive Beluga looks around
Robyn Angliss / NMML

Say your mother weakens. Her heart beats erratically, her breathing grows shallow. She starts to collapse. So you rush her to the hospital, hoping for tests, oxygen and saline drips, maybe even life support.

But the doctor refuses to admit her.

“We can’t treat your mother because we don’t know what’s wrong,” he says. “There’s no point in spending any money until we have a diagnosis.”

This alarming little tale mirrors the reasoning floated last week by Henry Springer, executive director of the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority, regarding the plight of the depleted beluga whales in Cook Inlet near Anchorage.

In an op-ed piece that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News, Springer argues that people know too little about this unique, isolated population to justify protecting them under the Endangered Species Act. (Read a pro-action argument by Audubon Alaska senior scientist John Schoen.)

Springer wrote:

“Accurate, long-term data is needed, and it currently does not exist. … Until it is scientifically established that human activity in Cook Inlet is causing the decline of the belugas, an ESA designation will unnecessarily curtail human activity.”

Springer is a no-nonsense bridge engineer who has previously made on-target comments in public forums. He must know very well that his beluga facts are wrong and reasoning absurd. The white creature in danger here may be far more elephant than whale.

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NCDC-NOAA

Hundreds of new Chinese factories belching smoke. Americans tooling around in old gas hogs. Coal-fired plants that strain to power air conditioners. A couple billion incandescent bulbs. Leaky, drafty homes. Wildfires. Shrinking ice. Warming duff.

Add it all up, and concentrations of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide — produced by the grinding combustion that drives modern life and fuels the world economy — have been accelerating.

A new study coordinated by scientists at California’s Carnegie Institution found that worldwide CO2 emissions have been speeding up at three times the rate seen in the 1990s. Instead of rising at 1.1% per year, emissions have leapt to 3.1% per year between 2000 and 2004.

“In many parts of the world, we are going backwards,” said Chris Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, in a news release about the findings.

Can you say “dustbowl?” “Extinctions?” “Coastal flooding?”

A better word might be “clueless.” Will we simply drive the planet off the cliff?

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