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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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