Far North Science

A male fur seal surveys its harem
Credit: Michael A. Etnier / Carnegie Inst

Most of the word’s northern fur seals now breed on the Pribilofs in the middle of Alaska’s Bering Sea or a few other offshore islands, with the largest rookeries centered on the beaches of St. Paul. After only four months on shore, these Far North seal moms wean their newborns and take to sea — a fraction of the time other pinniped matrons like Steller sea lions invest in their own offspring.

But Northern fur seals didn’t always live like this. A new study used evidence from ancient garbage to show that the species once bred and raised pups in rookeries ranging from California to the Aleutian Chain, almost certainly spending much longer with their young.

By analyzing bones from coastal archaeological sites, the study’s nine authors deciphered the diets of ancient people, and then deployed that data as a way to estimate the population and distribution of the animals.

“We were able to see changes in biogeography and behavior over time scales longer than ecologists usually think about,” said lead author Seth Newsome, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory, in a news release about the study. Newsome, who performed much of the work as a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had eight co-authors in the study.

The bottom line: During the past 1,000 years, the seals dramatically changed their reproductive behavior, shifted their ecology and shrank their geographic range.

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Walleye Pollock
AFSC-NOAA

The warming ocean off Alaska’s vast coast has triggered an unprecedented ecological seachange that began in the late 1970s and has continued into the new century.

It’s often called the “regime shift” — where an ocean once crawling with crab and shrimp and forage fish fattened up with goggle-eyed groundfish like pollock and strange, difficult-to-eat predators like arrowtooth flounder.

This warming, which continues, is now driving some fish further even north and while making it ever harder for animals like crab to flourish. It’s filling the sea with predatory fish that humans don’t eat. It’s peeling back the ice cap, eliminating habitat for walrus and seals.

In its wake comes trouble: Changes in the spring bloom that feeds the sea productivity. Possible invasive species like green crab. Acidification that will damage coral and stop some crab species from hardening their shells. Strange blooms. Diseased salmon. Shorter spring seasons of growth. Salmon in the Arctic? Tuna in the Gulf?

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What’s in your climate change wallet?
USFWS

Here we go again. The rhetoric and disinformation surrounding climate change science continues to grow ever more shrill.

In any given week, one might read that Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth is “science fiction.” That the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change practices “junk science.” That the Earth was colder (warmer) in the Little Ice Age (when the dinosaurs roamed.) That polar bears are thriving. That the sunspot cycles drive climate. That Antarctica’s ice cap has thickened.

That scientists challenging global warming might get “assassinated.” That those wacky climate modelers once tried to warn us about the danger of a new ice age, and just can’t seem to get their story straight.

And there you are, a regular person watching the sky, wondering if the mosquito you just swatted carries West Nile virus. In between paying bills and commuting to work, you ponder: Do droughts and wildfires prove global warming? Or is it those mondo hurricanes with nine feet of precipitation?

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Driftwood on a western Aleutian island
Credit: Ned Rozel

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 Thule people who lived in the High Arctic 1,000 years ago left behind spruce carvings that intrigue archaeologist Claire Alix because the Thule lived hundreds of miles from the nearest living tree. Their only source of wood was what drifted in from places unknown.

“Wood is well preserved in archaeological sites,” said Alix, an archaeologist with the Alaska Quaternary Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “It’s really plentiful in sites of (the Thule) period.”

Driftwood logs have tales to tell about past river and ocean circulation and climate, and Alix is one of the few scientists who study driftwood. When trees fall from the bank of a great river like the Yukon, Mackenzie, or the Anadyr in Siberia, they sometimes travel thousands of miles to the ocean. Once in the ocean, a Yukon spruce log can reach the eastern Arctic via Fram Straight, riding ice floes for a good portion of the way and taking many years to complete the trip.

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NASA’s QuikScat satellite detected extensive
areas of snowmelt, shown in yellow and red,
in west Antarctica in January 2005.
NASA/JPL

Here’s more heating news, this time from the cryosphere of the Far South, a region thought to be much cooler than the Far North and not as responsive to greenhouse gas influences.

A team of rocket scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and university researchers detected a massive snow meltdown on the ice covering West Antarctica, ultimately sloshing up an area larger than the state of California.

It was caused by warm temperatures in January 2005 — the peak of the austral summer.

“This was the first widespread Antarctic melting ever detected with NASA’s QuikScat satellite and the most significant melt observed using satellites during the past three decades,” NASA reported in a new release about the finding.

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Gray whales in Alaska
Credit: Sue Moore / NOAA

When kids from Main Elementary school in Kodiak tried to tally gray whales swimming past Narrow Cape a few weeks ago, they couldn’t do it.

Too many to count!

The great gray whale migration — one of the most extraordinary journeys undertaken by animals between their breeding habitat and feeding grounds — has crested like a wave along the shores and headlands of southern Alaska and surged out the Aleutian Chain toward Arctic seas.

Journey North, the educational website that tracks spring movements of species like American robins and monarch butterflies, has issued its final gray whale update for the 2007 season.

“Most whales — even some moms and babies — have reached Alaska, about 5,000 miles north of the babies’ birthplace,” the site reported this week.

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NCDC-NOAA

In the climate-warming horse race toward all-time record heat, 2007 continues to be hot. Very hot.

The first four months of the year have posted the highest average global temperatures since reliable record-keeping began in the 1880s, according to calculations published May 15 by the National Climate Data Center.

Driven largely by Northern Hemisphere land temperatures that sizzled 2.81 °F above normal, combined land and sea temperatures averaged 1.24 °F above the long-term normal, slipping past a previous record for the same period set in 2002.

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Credit: NOAA photo library

A humpback whale first seen 35 years ago in Southeast Alaska was photographed swimming off Maui in February 2006 and in Seymour Canal in December 2006 — becoming the longest scientifically tracked humpback on record.

The whale, thought to be a male designated NMMLID 229, was identified by comparing photographs of the markings and shape of its flukes. Using images of distinctive features to keep track of long-lived, ocean-crossing marine mammals like humpbacks and killer whales (scientists photograph the left side of orca dorsal fins and saddle patches) has evolved into one of the most important tools in a cetacean scientist’s box.

This particular whale was first sighted in 1972 in Lynn Canal near Juneau by pioneering whale researcher Charles Jurasz. Its flukes went into a federal database, allowing scientists to pinpoint the animal off and on over decades.

“With last year’s sightings, this whale has the longest identification record, 35 years, of any humpback whale”, said NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center Director Doug DeMaster said in a NOAA news release. “The record is a tribute to Charles Jurasz’ pioneering work, which started in the mid-1960s, long before whale biologists considered using photo-identification as a research tool.”

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