Far North Science

The sun sets on Alaska’s summer, over the
Fish River near White Mountain.
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.

You may not have noticed it as you were scooping fish out of the Copper River, or riding your bike through the tawny light of 10 p.m., but Alaska just made a left turn toward winter.

Much of the state will soon reach the average yearly date when the air won’t get any warmer. In Fairbanks, on July 19, the average daily temperature based on about a century of records drops from 63 to 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Anchorage, because the ocean is nearby, starts cooling later, on July 29, when the average temperature drops from 59 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit. Chandalar Lake reached its heat peak about July 15. Adak and Shemya in the Aleutians are two of the last places in Alaska to give in, with their average temperatures not dropping until late August and early September.

A person might think that since we get our maximum sunlight on the summer solstice (on or about June 21), we should also get our peak warmth then. The sun’s calling the shots, right?

Not entirely, said Martha Shulski of the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“We’re warmest a few weeks after the solstice,” she said.

Read on » » » »

Source: National Climate Data Center

Want to frustrate your local climate change deniers and their pseudo-scientific blather with hard facts and clever rejoinders?

The folks at Real Climate — a plain language web site about published by actual climate scientists — have launched a wiki with keyword searches and quick links to critiques, responses, explanations and sources.

The RC Wiki “is primarily an index for debunking of various popular media occurrences of climate-related nonsense,” according to its introduction.

“We do not include mainstream journalist pieces that are occasionally mistaken or somewhat sensationalist (see the main website for that kind of commentary), but we do include the op-ed pieces that are specifically designed to confuse, obfuscate and abuse the science.”

The scientists posting on RealClimate.org regularly deflate the propaganda and outright mistakes floated by both cynical climate change deniers and the very few sincere skeptics that remain. It’s also worth reading for the lively comments that follow each new article.

1002 Area: looking toward Brooks Range
Credit: USFWS

Here’s one more reason to exercise extreme caution before developing oil prospects in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: It’s a shorebird paradise.

Research led by Stephen Brown, of the Manomet Center for Conservation Science, has documented that an estimated 230,000 shorebirds nest in the area proposed for drilling, including 13 percent of North America’s pectoral sandpipers.

That makes the 1.6-million-acre “1002 area” between the Brooks Range foothills and the chilly Beaufort Sea a worldclass shorebird zone, more than qualified for international protection, according to Brown.

Read on » » » »

Two British explorers traveling the Arctic Coast of Canada in Feathercraft folding kayaks have hit a “wall of ice” blocking their route through the famed Northwest Passage.

In the first stage of a 3,000-mile kayak and dog-sled Arctic Voice expedition to visit Inuit villages and create links to schools in England, Glenn Morris and Stephen Doughty were forced to turn back from severe floes and return to the village of Tuktoyaktuk on July 11.

“It was like a massive maze,” Glenn wrote in the most recent dispatch. “We started going from straight forwards to sideways to backwards and then we ended up realising that there were these huge lumps of pack ice were closing around us. …”

Read on » » » »

Surface melt on Greenland ice sheet
Credit: Roger Braithwaite / EarthIsland Institute

A new NASA analysis of climate change warns that the Earth’s remaining ice sheets could melt much faster than predicted, drowning even the most alarming projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a sea of unprecedented disaster.

Where the IPCC chilled the world by adding two feet to sea level by the end of the century — a shift that would displace hundreds of millions of people and cause billions in damage to coastal communities — the study says a more realistic scenario might boost the waves by more than 80 feet.

Inundated by spreading meltwater and rising temps, Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets could suddenly “flip” states, disintegrate in a few decades and precipitate what the authors call it a “planetary emergency.”

The paper, written by James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and five co-authors, begins:

Palaeoclimate data show that the Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to global forcings. Positive feedbacks predominate. This allows the entire planet to be whipsawed between climate states.

One feedback, the ‘albedo flip’ property of ice/water, provides a powerful trigger mechanism. A climate forcing that ‘flips’ the albedo of a sufficient portion of an ice sheet can spark a cataclysm. Inertia of ice sheet and ocean provides only moderate delay to ice sheet disintegration and a burst of added global warming.

Recent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of our control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures.

Climate change and trace gases may be the one of the most important climate discussions of the year so far, remarkable for its plain, down-to-earth language and blunt style. It needs to be read.

Credit: Alaska Division of Community and Business Development

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.

Thirty years ago, about 100 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, a welder fused a section of 48-inch pipe with molten metal. When he snuffed his torch, the trans-Alaska pipeline was an 800-mile tube of steel. On June 20, 1977, oil began flowing from the bowels of the earth at Prudhoe Bay, through Pump Station 1, and into the trans-Alaska pipeline.

At the time, an editorial in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner heralded the pipeline as the world’s largest private construction project. Others had grander analogies, comparing the pipeline to the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China.

More than 28,000 Alyeska Pipeline Service Company workers and contractors worked on the pipeline at the peak of activity in 1975, and 31 people died in activities related to pipeline construction, according to Alyeska Pipeline Service Company.

The pipeline almost wasn’t built.

Read on » » » »

Photo by USFWS

A 20-year study of Alaska’s polar bears blames the steady disintegration of summer sea ice for the dramatic increase in pregnant and nursing females denning on land — where sows and their cubs may fare worse.

Landward and eastward shift of Alaskan polar bear denning associated with recent sea ice changes, published online in Polar Biology, offers yet one more confirmation that Arctic climate warming has begun to change the lives of Alaska’s polar bears by melting back their Beaufort Sea ice habitat and hunting platform.

Only a few decades ago, sea ice would start freezing close to shore by late September. Now the ice edge might be more than 125 miles out until later in the fall.

“In recent years, Arctic pack ice has formed progressively later, melted earlier and lost much of its older and thicker multi-year component,” said lead author Anthony Fischbach, in a USGS story about the research. “Together, these changes have resulted in pack ice that is a less stable platform on which to give birth and raise new cubs.

“Previous research had already shown that unstable ice can result in failures of on-ice denning attempts. Less ice that is suitable for denning apparently has led to an increased frequency of pregnant polar bears in this region choosing to den on land.”

Read on » » » »

Tagging a beluga in Cook Inlet near Anchorage
Credit: NMML

More than 130,000 people have now emailed or written the feds about the fate of Cook Inlet’s depleted white whales. With a week to go before public hearings, here’s a glimpse of Knik Arm’s indigenous belugas.

On a summer day three years ago, a pod swam on the rising tide, only about 15 miles upstream from Alaska’s urban center in Anchorage. Their arching backs winked white against the brown water. Their breaths exploded in quick brilliant clouds that faded fast in the sunshine. A few whistled, making a faint and eerie sound.

These were some of the rarest belugas alive — one of the smallest distinct and genetically isolated populations of marine mammals on the planet. On that day in 2004, a couple dozen ventured within a quarter mile of a 12-foot skiff carrying marine mammal biologist Mike Williams and two others, Williams started the motor. He was conducting a survey as part of studies for the Knik Arm bridge crossing, and wanted to reposition the boat to get a better count as the whales swam by.

But the belugas — one of the smallest distinct populations of intelligent marine mammals on the planet — apparently recognized the droning of human presence. And what had been a smooth conga line of cruising cetaceans quickly swirled into a tight, water-churning group.

They veered toward the boat in a confused mob, whistling and blowing and trumpeting brassy notes. About 100 yards out, they cut toward shore — white adults and gray babies obscured by the roiling and splashing of the inlet’s silty flow. They were almost impossible to see, let alone count.

Though Williams had benign intentions, with a goal of gathering scientific data for their conservation, the whales wanted nothing to do with a skiff and outboard motor.

“It’s so easy to prescribe some kind of plot (to the whales’ behavior), but I don’t know,” Williams said, watching as the animals finally spread out closer to shore and turned north toward Eklutna near the head of Knik Arm northeast of Anchorage. “There are always going to be way more questions when we’re done.”

It’s now time to start answering those questions.

Read on » » » »