Far North Science

The human footprint on Earth
Credit: Science

A review published this week in the journal of Science details how humans have been “taming” the home planet — clearing forests, growing crops, crisscrossing oceans, laying concrete and asphalt.

“We have domesticated vast landscapes and entire ecosystems,” wrote ecologist Peter Kareiva,
chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, and three co-authors.

“Humans have so tamed nature that few locations in the world remain without human influence. Global maps of human impact indicate that, as of 1995, only 17 percent of the world’s land area had escaped direct influence by humans.”

One of the most intriguing angles suggested by their discussion may be what’s missing — and where. Check out the Far North on the map. Alaska and the Arctic remain one of the few global blank zones, where humans have not terraformed the ecology for safety, food and pleasure.

Read on » » » »

Credit: Arctic Arc

Scientists working with the Arctic Arc expedition from Siberia to Greenland have posted some startling observations. Coupled with the shattered, disintegrating ice experienced by the explorers on the 106-day traverse over the North Pole and down the ice-bound coast of Greenland, it makes for sobering reading.

In fact, the story, posted on the Arctic Arc site, could make “your flesh creep:”

“You should know first of all”, explained (climate scientist) Thierry Fichefet, “that in the Arctic, the warming observed in recent years is twice as great as anywhere else on earth. … The extent of the sea ice in the Arctic has decreased, in the course of the last thirty years, by approximately 2.7% per decade. … In summer, we observed a reduction in the summer extent of the Arctic sea ices of almost 7.5% per decade.”

Read on » » » »

Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer
traversed the Arctic

Two Belgium explorers finally reached Greenland, completing one of the most difficult polar journeys of recent decades and documenting the disintegrating ice cap of the Far North.

From the Arctic Arc site:

“Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer have just accomplished a major first in the history of the world.

The journey across the Arctic from Siberia to Greenland had never been done until now. The conditions under which this adventure was undertaken — never able to rest and braving the obvious harsh conditions in the Arctic — make this athletic feat all the more extraordinary and places it amongst the most prominent achievements in the history of the poles.”

The two men skied and trudged from Siberia to the North Pole, then veered south and finally pitched their tent in Greenland snow on June 14. They spent 106 days on the drifting floes, and traveled more than 1,000 miles through fractured ice, jagged pressure ridges and fissured pans.

Read on » » » »

Autonomous underwater vehicle Puma will “sniff out”
the source of hot, mineral-rich fluids venting from the
seafloor, and vehicle Jaguar will use cameras and
bottom-mapping sonar to image the location.
Credit: E. Paul Oberlander/ WHOI

The dim, frigid floor of the Arctic Ocean is more mysterious than the dark side of the moon.

It’s got primordial life and unknown thermal vents. Less explored than Mars, this high-pressure world far beneath the ice may be as remote from human knowledge as some exotic habitat on another planet.

But a team of scientists and engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) plan to penetrate the Arctic’s abyss. With new robotic submarines and other tricky technology, they will roam this unseen world for signs of new forms of life, some possibly stewed into existence by hot magma and boiling sea water.

“They hope to discover exotic seafloor life and submarine hot springs in a region of the ocean that has been mostly cut off from other ecosystems for at least 26 million years,” WHOI announced this week.

Read on » » » »

Modern gray wolf was puppy
compared to its larger ancient cousin
Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons

They were carnivorous giants, as large as small bears and as fierce as saber-tooth tigers. They tore into the megafauna of Alaska’s prehistoric steppes with savage cunning and bone-snapping jaws.

But these ancient wolves — far more aggressive and much larger than modern gray wolves of North America — went extinct about 12,000 years ago, disappearing along with the other gigantic mammals that roamed the Beringian plains during the ice age.

A team of scientists has now shown that these mondo Pleistocene predators were a different previously unknown breed of wolf entirely — so highly specialized for taking down their large prehistoric prey that they could not survive the ecological shift at the end of the Ice Age.

“We thought possibly they would be related to Asian wolves instead of American wolves because North America and Asia were connected during that time period,” said Jennifer A. Leonard of University of California at Los Angeles, in a release. “That they were completely unrelated to anything living was quite a surprise.”

Read on » » » »

Credit: Toke Thomas Hoye, NERI

Flowers bloomed sooner. Insects swarmed earlier. Birds laid their eggs many weeks ahead.

But the flies were the champs.

Global warming has advanced the miracle of spring in the High Arctic of northeast Greenland as much as a month between 1996 and 2005. A team of Danish scientists found animals and plants near the Zackenberg Research Station bursting to life much earlier than expected — in some cases jump-starting the season of renewal by more than 30 days.

“In particular, flies are record holders by occurring up to 35 days earlier than usual,” the scientists wrote in a story about their results. “Such dramatic shifts due to warmer spring have not been observed before so consistently across very different species.”

Credit: Toke Thomas Hoye, NERI

The study, published in the June 21 issue of Current Biology, also suggested that you can’t blame the changes directly on the rise in June temperatures of about 2 ° F over a decade, the authors say.

In the harsh white world of the Far North tundra, it’s the earlier snow melt that has been driving these startling phenological shifts.

Read on » » » »

The photo shows shoreline uplifted during
a massive 1899 earthquake near Yakutat.
From the 1912 USGS paper, The
Earthquakes at Yakutat Bay, Alaska

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.

More than a century ago, eight prospectors were panning the glacial sands near Hubbard Glacier when Earth starting shaking and never seemed to stop. A few days later, they had survived a natural phenomenon they probably should not have.

Geologists Ralph Tarr and Lawrence Martin, in the area a few years later to study the marvelous glaciers, saw things like mussels “resembling clumps of blue flowers” on rocks 20 feet above the ocean. They saw so much evidence of a giant earthquake they interviewed a few prospectors in Yakutat and included their stories in a 1912 government paper, “The Earthquakes at Yakutat Bay, Alaska, in September, 1899.”

When Tarr and Martin arrived in Yakutat, prospector A. Flenner was working as a carpenter there six years after the series of large earthquakes, the biggest being a magnitude 8.0 that happened on Sept. 10, 1899. Flenner had been panning for gold in the area that day.

“Mr. Flenner stated in 1905 that after the first shock on September 3 they rigged up a home-made seismograph, consisting of hunting knives hung so that their points touched and would jingle under a slight oscillation,” Tarr and Martin wrote. “With this instrument (rude, perhaps, but more delicate than their own perception) they counted 52 shocks on September 10, up to the time of the heavy disturbance (the 8.0 earthquake) that caused so much damage.”

Read on » » » »

Driven by record high temperatures across Asia and Siberia, the Earth simmered to the third warmest boreal spring on record — with the fourth warmest May, according to the National Climate Data Center.

Global temperatures posted 1.08 °F above normal, only a fraction of a degree below the record set in 2005 for the same three-month period.

But the big picture glossed over some interesting if not alarming details, according to NCDC’s latest climate report.

In southern Alaska, for instance, spring chilled to the 38th coolest seen since the late 1800s, almost 2 degrees below normal. The Lower 48 states came in at the fifth warmest, extending a severe drought and delivering tornadoes. Elsewhere, oceans were cooler, as was Argentina and Chili. In general, the Southern Hemisphere was warm, but not in near record terms.

Read on » » » »