Far North Science

Tagging a beluga in Cook Inlet near Anchorage
Credit: NMML

Should the genetically isolated beluga whales of Cook Inlet be protected under the Endangered Species Act? Can we afford the extra costs? Can we afford to let them die out?

People can answer these questions in person at two new public hearings scheduled on July 20 in Anchorage and July 19 in Homer by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

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.

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One estimate of the cost for bridging Knik Arm is $600 million. But such an immense amount of capital could fuel many other megaprojects. Has imagination finally failed Alaska, land of the Last Big Dream?

Here’s one better way to knead that dough.

Great civilizations once erected great libraries. While Alaska mayn’t qualify as a particularly fine civilization (or even an outlying shanty town on the fringe of an semi-nice burg) we now might have the chance to create what could be the greatest library of the Far North.

If we throw up such a thing, with the world’s knowledge housed, catalogued, filed, posted and stored for their use, they will come by the thousands. And they will stay to build houses, start businesses, raise children, seed ideas.

Think this is unlikely? Consider the somewhat controversial eddy in economics called new growth theory — which argues that increasing and shared knowledge is the real driver behind the modern economic engine.

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The Mountain Avens emigrated
to Svalbard from Russia.
Credit: Bjørn Erik Sandbakk

As the Arctic warms up, will plants migrate fast enough to find suitable habitats?

The answer to the question may be hidden in what has already happened during previous dramatic warming episodes, like when ice sheets retreated and exposed new land.

The assumption, of course, is that plant dispersal occurs at a glacial pace, marching seed by seed up a mountain slope, or yard by yard across a newly exposed glacial outwash. And that could mean extinction for many plants that won’t reach nurturing habitats, if global warming shifts habitat zones as fast as projected under some climate models.

But scientists say plants may be far trickier travelers than we humans realize. In a study published June 15 in the journal of Science, a team of Norwegian researchers found many different regions colonized the extremely remote Svalbard archipelago several times over the past 20,000 years since the Last Glacial Maximum.

In some cases, their seeds traveled thousands of miles over deep ocean — via wind or drifting ice — to nail a new niche on the Svalbard tundra.

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It’s bobbing out there now, tracking
acifification of the Gulf of Alaska
Credit: NOAA

When the Earth’s atmosphere fills with ever more CO2, most of the gas eventually gets absorbed by the ocean. If it’s not trapping heat, then global warming won’t increase as fast. That’s good, right?

Wrong. The dribbling of CO2 into the Pacific Ocean, and other seas across the globe, has triggered an inexorable increase in acidification — a process that threatens sea life and the foundation of the food chain.

To gauge this particularly sinister aspect of climate change, a team from the National Science Foundation has launched the first buoy to monitor the rise of acidity in the Gulf of Alaska. As the 10-foot diameter instrument bobs and rolls on the Gulf’s mighty swells, it will also taste the air, measure the wind, and feel the temperature

“The instruments will measure the air-sea exchange of carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen gas in addition to the pH, a measure of ocean acidity, of the surface waters,” said Steven Emerson of the University of Washington, the project’s lead scientist. “This is the first system specifically designed to monitor ocean acidification.”

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Alone and afoot off Greenland

The Arctic ice pack has shattered, leaving two Belgium explorers struggling toward Greenland, cut off from shore with only 75 miles to go.

On an expedition to measure snow depths across the Arctic Ocean — from Siberia over the North Pole and through the unknown and little visited ice off Northwest Greenland —
Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer have been fighting through a fractured hell of floes, blocks, ridges and open water.

“Day after day, conditions are getting inexorably tougher for the expedition: the sea ice has broken up, isolating our explorers from the coast and forcing them to change their route once again by taking a big detour around the dangerous zone,” reported the June 8 dispatch on their website.

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Nozomu Takeuchi visits the Gulkana Glacier
in the Alaska Range, 2001. Photo by 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.

A scientist wearing plastic boots and crampons knelt on Gulkana Glacier and pointed at the king of beasts, a snow flea.

“He is the top of the food chain on this glacier,” said glacial biologist Nozomu Takeuchi.

The snow flea, a tiny wingless insect also known as a springtail, sprung away at the advance of Takeuchi’s finger, landing near a stream of meltwater. Takeuchi opened a notebook and scribbled with a pencil. He was on the Alaska Range glacier on a rainy day to study algae, the food of the snow flea and the key to life on the surface of glaciers. (See his snow flea images.)

Algae are microscopic plant-like organisms that use the energy of sunlight to make their own food. The many species of algae on Earth capture more of the sun’s energy and produce more oxygen than all plants combined. In adapting to life on ice, algae have provided food for the snow flea and many other wee creatures of the ice.

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Arctic Haze distributes soot
Credit: Geophysical Institute

It’s an old Alaska gardening trick: scatter wood ash on the late-melting snow. The April-May sun will eat darkened stuff up, exposing the Earth and fertilzing the loam.

As any Far North resident knows well, dirty snow melts faster.

But what about the Arctic Ice and Far North climate, where the Earth has been warming many times faster than the rest of the globe?

A team of scientists from the University of California Irvine have confirmed what common sense predicts: the soot-stained polar ice and snow has become a major driver of Arctic warming, perhaps explaining up to one-third of the warming most studies blame on greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

“It’s like placing tiny toaster ovens on the snow pack,” said scientist Charlie Zender, in a UCI story about the study, the first to take into account forest fires and estimate the full impact of fall-out on warming.

Unlike much of the climate science that hinges on gig-busting supercomputer programs and rocket-science complexity, the relationship between warming and soot is as fundmental as road dirt.

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Humboldt penguins are native to the Southern
Hemisphere. These Humboldts lived at Stanley
Park in Vancouver, BC.
Credit: Dee Boersma

Penguins, those well-dressed fish-eating, deep-diving birds of the Far South, have ventured into Alaska waters more than once. And several penguin experts at the University of Washington say they almost certainly hitched rides to the northern hemisphere aboard fishing boats.

The strange appearance of penguins in the Far North didn’t occur, for instance, due some bizarre global climatic shift. Or through some extraordinary migration gone 5,000 miles off course.

Blame the old cute-o-meter.

“The crews keep the penguins as pets on board the boat. They’re appealing,” said Amy Van Buren, a UW doctoral student in biology, in a news release about the findings. “People keep them around because they’re so cute.”

With Dee Boersma, a UW biology professor and noted pengui-phile, Van Buren ruled out migration, escapees from zoos and remnant survivors from long-ago attempts to seed the Pacific Northwest with penguins.

But they did find one likely prospect: Stowaways.

“The most probable explanation is that the creatures were hauled aboard boats — probably fishing boats — in southern waters and were kept by the crews as the vessels traveled far to the north, then were released,” according to the story about their research.

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