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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