Far North Science

Photo of steam plume and incandescent lava at Pavlof,
on the night of August 28, 2007, as seen from Sand Point,
Credit: Bill Rison / AVO

Pavlov Volcano, a 8,261-foot cone rising from the Alaska Peninsula southwest of Anchorage, blasted a plume sparkling with lightning almost four miles into the sky on Aug. 30, continuing an eruption that began in mid-August and could be building toward a colossal explosion.

Although weather satellites did not detect ash, scientists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory say the presence of lightning in the plume suggests it carried gobs of the abrasive particles so dangerous to aircraft and jet engines.

The evening dispatch from AVO:

National Weather Service observers in Cold Bay reported a substantial plume and associated lightning emanating from Pavlof Volcano up to 20,000 ft (6,000 m) above sea level. The plume was also visible in images from thePavlof web camera located in Cold Bay.

The web cam — one of several the observatory trains on its misbehaving volcanoes — went active this week and can offer a startling, other-worldly glimpse of the Pacific Ring of Fire at work.

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Portage Glacier retreats, yes indeed.
But is it due to climate warming?
Source: USFS

Five top scientists have been traveling around Alaska with five evangelical Christian leaders this week, inspecting signs of climate change and talking to Alaskans who live on the front lines of Arctic warming.

There’s been coverage in the Anchorage Daily News, the Harvard Medical School PR machine and the Associated Press. Organized by Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the contingent visited the coastal village Shishmaref, held press conferences in Anchorage and Portage, spent time pondering the retreat of several Southcentral Alaska glaciers.

There’s good news here and, unfortunately, one of those climate change media goofs that so delights the deniers, liars and Far Right nimnos.

First the good. The people of Shishmaref, located on a sandy barrier island facing the Chukchi Sea, may be more threatened by Arctic climate change than any other Far North residents. Late forming sea ice leaves their community vulnerable to the surf and surge of fall storms, bringing waves that undercut banks, unbury already warmed permafrost, and ultimately consume land, houses and roads.

A Shishmaref house topples
Shismaref Relocation Committee

The record meltdown of Arctic ice this summer has now exposed Shishmaref and other barrier island villages like Kivalina to an unprecedented hazard come fall, with an extraordinary fetch of open water that will take a long time to freeze solid. Check out these photos from a particularly damaging storm in 2004.

So international attention gets properly focused on Alaska Native villages edging toward another fall erosion disaster.

But there’s a dark side to this publicity, one that could feed climate denier fodder.

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Source: NSIDC

With two to three weeks left before the end of the annual melt season in the Arctic Ocean, the polar ice cap continues to disintegrate into unprecedented slush.

As of Aug. 27, the Arctic ice pack covered an estimate 1.84 million square miles — at least 10 percent below the previous absolute record minimum extent set on Sept. 20-21, 2005.

During the past week, an ice-covered zone almost as large of Louisiana simply disappeared — threatening marine mammals like polar bears with increasing habitat loss and Alaska Native villages with exposure to devastating fall storms.

Satellite coverage has never recorded so little ice on the Arctic Ocean. It’s been the season of the Perfect Melt.

Still, the rate has begun to slow, with the angle of the sun beginning to lengthen and the power of solar melt starting to wane, according to the latest release from the ice-melt countdown by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. (The week before, the melted zone covered an area as large as New Mexico.)

For more details on how the ice wizards at NSIDC calculate ice extent, and how they compare that information to ice area, check out the latest dispatch.

Marine scientists working with the University of Alaska Fairbanks will soon have access to a state-of-the-art ship to conduct long voyages and challenging research in the Arctic Ocean and other remote seas.

After 30 years of planning, the university was awarded the first $2.5 million in funding to build the Alaska Region Research Vessel — a 236-foot, $123-million ice-strengthened vessel specifically designed for cruising the Arctic Ocean and jostling among the floes.

Several scientists had long expressed frustration with the limited capabilities offered by the now retired 37-year-old Alpha Helix. President Bush included $56 million in the 2006 budget to help the National Science Foundation launch the project.

“The ARRV will be the first vessel in the U.S. academic research fleet capable of breaking ice up to 2.5 ft thick,” said Terry Whitledge, director of the Institute of Marine Science at the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and the project leader. “With this level of ice-breaking technology, it will literally allow us to go where we haven’t been able to go before.”

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Magnetic north changes all the time
because of forces within the Earth.
Credit: 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. This column first appeared in 2002.

Fairbanks adventurer Roger Siglin has journeyed close to the magnetic north pole. Near Resolute, in the northern area of Canada now known as Nunavut, Siglin was 300 miles from the magnetic north pole, the wandering spot on Earth’s surface that attracts compass needles and confounds scientists.

There, his compass needle dipped like a divining rod over water.

“I had to tilt the compass quite a bit to keep the needle from hitting the face,” said Siglin, whose snowmachine odysseys have taken him thousands of miles in the high Arctic.

The magnetic north pole is now (in 2002) somewhere centered on the Arctic Ocean north of Canada, approximately latitude 82 degrees north and longitude 114 degrees west. It won’t be there long.

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Credit: NOC

Where the infamous Atlantic Ocean conveyor belt is concerned — inspiration for at least one climate-change thriller that brought 100-foot-deep snowdrifts over America’s East Coast and Dennis Quaid to the rescue — it’s still the “Day Before.”

A team of scientists have installed a series of mooring buoys and have actually begun to measure how the current shifts and changes over the year. And it’s still too soon to know what changes in the flow mean.

Oceanographers Stuart Cunningham and Torsten Kanzow supervised an international project to sink a string of moorings and then collect data for analysis. The scientists work for the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, Great Britain.

“The scientists captured the fickle flow of Atlantic currents by comparing what the moorings’ current meters revealed with measurements of the streams’ effects on an unused telephone wire stretching between Florida and the Bahamas as well as satellite measurements of surface winds,” according to an online story in Scientific American.

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Rainbow over Coronation Gulf, Arctic Canada

Two British explorers traveling the Arctic Coast of Canada in Feathercraft folding kayaks and sled dog teams have reached the end of their journey in Kugluktuk, in the far reaches of Nunavut. But not before finding insight into the resilience of Inuit and Athabascan people in the face of climate change.

Northern people have always adapted, says Glenn Morris, in his final blog entry posted on Aug. 16.

Maybe it’s the people of the South who will struggle when the temperature rises above 100, the hurricanes blow and the droughts dry the fields.

“One point that was made to us and it’s the only time this point has been made to us — but it was very profound — and that is as a culture the aboriginal people — the Inuit, the Inuvialuit, the Gwich’in and everyone else are very, very adaptable people,” Morris wrote.

And it was put to us that a lot of these people here, the native people here, will adapt. They will take on the challenges of changing environment and climate change but in actual fact city dwellers and people who live down south will not be able to do that because they don’t intrinsically have the necessary skills of living in the environment and being able to adapt to it in simple terms.

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The crew of the expedition
Credit: Ocean Drilling Program

Sorting out when the colossal continental ice sheets swallowed the Far North and Far South, and when they chilled only one region at a time, is one of the knottiest problems in the study of paleoclimate.

Over millions of years, the sheets grew to cover vast landscapes, then subsided and melted back,possibly in response to periodic changes in the Earth’s orbit, possibly triggered by rise and fall of greenhouse gases like CO2.

One recent interpretation argued that extensive ice covered both hemispheres about 41 million years ago — despite other evidence that an ancient greenhouse impact had baked the Earth to much higher temperatures than we see today.

Well, the North was ice free after all, according to a new study by core-drilling scientists with the Joint Oceanographic Institutions, drawing on samples taken during expeditions in the early 2000s.

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