Far North Science

The remains of a 650-year old birch
bark basket complete with stitching
holes, found at the base of an ice
patch in the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains.
Photo by William Manley

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.

On a late summer evening a few years ago, a scrap of birch bark caught the eye of William Manley as he walked along the edge of an ice field in the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains. The geologist yelled to nearby archaeologist Jim Dixon and Ruth Ann Warden of the Ahtna Heritage Foundation.

“When I pointed it out to Jim and Ruth Ann, they immediately saw that it was something special,” said Manley, who works for the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Dixon and Warden noticed stitching holes in the bark fragment that lay among recently exposed rocks and moss. After later dating the birch-bark basket, they found an Alaskan had left it at the site about 650 years ago.

The basket is one of many artifacts scientists are finding on ice patches — dying fields of snow and ice that are too small to flow like glaciers. These ice patches, located in the mountains of Alaska and Canada, are shrinking to reveal at their edges arrow shafts, barbed antler points, and other items that usually decompose before archaeologists can find them.

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The Puma, or “plume mapper,” vehicle uses sonar,
lasers, and chemical sensors to search wide areas
near the ocean floor to detect the telltale temperature,
chemical, and turbidity signals from hydrothermal
vent plumes. Credit: Hanumant Singh/WHOI

The dispatch titles tell a compelling tale all their own: Life on the Edge and Echoes from the Deep. Or how about Puma is unveiled and unleashed?

A team of scientists and engineers on the Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition have now ventured hundreds of miles into the shattered summer pack aboard the icebreaker Oden on their mission to seek out new volcanic vents, map oozing submarine lava, and maybe greet and catalog some strange abyssal life.

So far, they’ve logged 24 different updates with glimpses of life aboard the ship and insight into the knotty problems that accompany launching robot subs to cruise beneath ice floes.

Even in an age where every snow-tramping adventurer with a biology degree and a snazzy diga-cam uploads dispatches to their website, this project sponsored by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has been exceptionally informative.

The slide shows have got narrative flow, with captions that further the story told by the image rather than simply repeating the obvious details in words.

Check out There and Back Again, posted on July 21:

Sometime after 7 a.m. Friday, about 3,700 meters, or 2.3 miles under the Arctic Ocean ice cap, the robotic vehicle Puma lost a thruster on a mission to search for plumes from hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Scientists, engineers, and the crew of the icebreaker Oden all mobilized to try to get the hobbled vehicle back to the surface, to guide Puma to a rendezvous with Oden in the shifting ice pack, and to make a hole in the densely packed ice for Puma to surface safely.

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Researchers apply a dilute formalin solution
to discourage growth of fungi that colonized
the carcass after it eroded out of a Siberian
riverbank. (Credit: Daniel Fisher, UM)

Global warming may expose even more secrets of the ice age. The well-preserved remains of a four-month-old baby wooly mammoth recovered from melting permafrost in Siberia last spring will now undergo sophisiticated testing and analysis at University of Michigan for testing.

Scientists hope to pinpoint exactly how long ago the creature died, among other things.

“It’s the best and most complete mammoth carcass — baby or adult — ever found,” said Daniel Fisher, curator of paleontology at the U-M Museum of Paleontology and part of a six-member international team that examined the frozen, nearly intact remains of a 4-month-old female wooly mammoth.

Woolly mammoths roamed the Far North for tens of thousands of years, one of the large mammals that thrived in a dry steppe that stretched from eastern Europe across Siberia and the exposed Bering Land Bridge into Alaska. The iconic ice age beasts — Alaska’s official state fossil — went extinct about 10,000 years ago, victims of changing climate and possible overhunting by spear-wielding humans.

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Gray whale take a peek
Credit: NOAA

Hunted almost to the brink of extinction, the gnarly gray whales of the eastern North Pacific have rebounded to about 20,000 animals. That population, protected from commercial whaling for many decades, now treks from the Baja to the Alaskan Arctic in one of the world’s great migrations.

Their Journey North along the Pacific Northwest and southern Alaska gets studied by scientists, watched by whale-lovers, tracked by school children. During the trip, it’s an undulating conga-line of muscle and blubber through the green-water swells.

Once in the Arctic, the 30-ton bottom-feeders churn up acres of muck in their quest to scarf down invertebrates, offering a snout-tilling boost to the seabed ecology that enriches the food chain. In turn, these grays get chomped by key pods of the rare mammal-eating killer whales, the ocean’s most elusive and intelligent predator.

In all, it’s a 5,000-mile-long spectacle that echoes the bounty once common in pre-industrial oceans worldwide. The eastern Pacific gray whale recovery is one of the world’s great conservation success stories, proof that scientific knowledge coupled with public resolve can create space for the ocean’s giant mammals to thrive.

Not so fast.

Sakhalin gray whale
Credit: ICUN / David W. Weller

There’s another population of gray whales in the Pacific, one that’s never been allowed to rebound. And if people don’t act, they may still be driven into extinction by failure to protect their only known feeding grounds.

Listed as critically endangered on the ICUN’s red list, the westen gray whales number about 120 animals with only 25 to 35 breeding females. They migrate from southern China to eastern Russia in a paltry echo of their genetic cousins across the sea.

Where eastern Pacific gray whales find a quiet Chukchi and Bering sea to fill their bellies, the western whales struggle to forage along Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the presence of an oil-drilling cacophony that repeatedly drives them from their food.

Oil producers say they won’t change their practices to help.

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High winds move snow on a ridge of Mount McKinley.
Credit: Tohru Saito, International Arctic Research Center

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.

On June 29, 2007, Tohru Saito trudged up the steep sidehill to Denali Pass on a mission different than the hundreds of other climbers who tackle Mount McKinley every year.

Saito, who works at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was there to do annual maintenance on a weather station perched on the mountain at 18,733 feet.

Though he wouldn’t reach the station for a few hours, Saito knew where to look for it. He stole a glance to the ridge above and saw the weather station and the spinning wind cups of its anemometer. That was a good sign, but his intuition told him there was something strange about where the station stood.

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Credit: NCDC

It’s hot out there. The first six months baked the Northern Hemisphere to the highest average temperatures on record. This up-North warmth — about 2.5 °F above the long-term average — carried the entire globe to the second warmest half-year recorded since 1998.

And don’t diss this as a pathetic second-place showing. The average temps blended over the planet between January and June were 1.13 °F above average, only .02 °F below the record set for the same period in 1998. Would a two-hundredths of a degree plunge feel like a cooling breeze to you? The sweat drips as fast, and the air conditioners groan.

Blame hot weather over Asian land masses. The records were set despite a somewhat cooler six months over the Earth’s oceans and the Southern Hemisphere, where it was only the fifth warmest half-year on record. (We’ve become so used to seeing new records, we’re reduced to using “only” when it’s fifth out of 127.)

The figures, posted online this week by the National Climate Data Center, come as Arctic sea ice extent remains below average and the United States experiences drought and above average heat — the 18th warmest January-to-June temperatures since the 1880s. Extensive drought continued in some parts of the West and South.

The Far North wasn’t in lockstep with the global trends. Alaska was merely slightly above normal in June, capping a slightly above normal winter that included plenty of cold. See the Alaska Climate Research Center for details.

Arctic sea ice extent remained far below average for June, but remained above the record minimums seen in the last two Junes. The key moment to gauge sea ice arrives in early fall.

Gray whales swimming
Credit: Sue Moore / NOAA Magazine

When scientists moored a couple of acoustic recorders in the Arctic Ocean northeast of Barrow in October 2003, they wanted to eavesdrop on the songs of bowhead, gray and other cetaceans as they feast on the polar ocean’s summer bounty.

And then, as darkness fell and the ocean froze, the whales would exit though the Bering Strait and the sea would go silent.

After all, the great whales can die if caught in thick ice — three gray whales trapped in ever shrinking leads near Barrow triggered an international rescue in the fall of 1988. At least one animal disappeared before a Russian ice-breaker plowed a path to open water.

But a few gray whales didn’t get the memo.

Instead of joining 10,000 other Pacific grays on their 5,000-mile fall migration to wintering grounds in Mexico, the intelligent bottom-feeding invertebrate munchers spent the winter amid Alaska’s Arctic pack.

In a stunning finding that raises questions about accelerating climate change and undermines assumptions about gray whale behavior, an autonomous acoustic device anchored 4,100 feet beneath the surface of the frozen Beaufort Sea recorded gray whale calls throughout the winter of 2003-04.

“Because this is the first-ever winter-long acoustic study, we cannot be certain that gray whales have not over-wintered in the Beaufort Sea in the past,” the authors wrote in a report published in June in the journal Arctic. “However, a combination of increasing population size and habitat alteration associated with sea ice reduction and warming in the Alaskan Arctic may be responsible for the extra-seasonal gray whale occurrence near Barrow.”

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Tad Pfeffer and Mark Meier at Eureka, Ellesmere Island
in 1989. Photo: Tad Pfeffer.

Melting glaciers and small ice caps will raise sea levels by four to 10 inches over the next century — possibly making the largest contribution to changing ocean levels as the globe continues to warm.

An international team of scientists calculated the contributions from melting glaciers, containing only about 1 percent of the volume of the great ice sheets in Greeland and Antarctica. They reported their results this week in the journal of Science as a cautionary tale.

“Small glaciers and ice caps, not the polar ice sheets, will contribute the majority of sea level rise caused by ice melting by 2100,” researchers report. Most sea-level researchers have focused on the massive polar ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica because they contain the overwhelming majority of frozen water. But this study, led by Mark F. Meier, the scientists “found that glaciers could contribute 60 percent, or 10 to 25 centimeters, of the total contributions to sea level rise from melting ice.”

Melt them all of these glaciers down to rock — something worth contemplating because mountain glaciers and ice caps all exist in vulnerable environments — and they could raise sea levels by almost 40 inches.

“Disintegrating glacier ice constitutes a significant and accelerating cause of global sea-level rise,” Meier and seven co-authors wrote in “Glaciers Dominate Eustatic Sea-Level Rise in the 21st Century.”

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