Far North Science

A female and male crested auklet, left, engage in alloanointing
on St. Lawrence Island in June of 2007. During courtship,
females and males intertwine necks, an embrace that
helps to distribute the citrus scent in their feathers.
Credit: Hector Douglas/UAF

Scented oil. Perfumed feathers. Circular motion. And a willing horizontal pose.

Don’t click off yet — you’re not about to read those sticky porn posts that can gag your trusty Internet filter. But you will find what passes for auklet bliss on the rocky shores of the Bering Sea.

A University of Alaska Fairbanks / Kuskokwim Campus biology professor Hector Douglas has uncovered the floral secrets to crested auklet courtship, and their steamy mating ritual sounds like a cross between delousing and edible massage.

As UAF writer Marmiam Grimes puts it, “Hitting it off with members of the opposite sex takes chemistry.”

During their courtship gyrations, the male and female birds rub each other with a “citrus-like scent” secreted from special back feathers that act sort of like wicks. Whether the scent triggers a surge of avian passion or not, Grimes has found the substance might just protect the birds from parasites. Like ticks.

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On Aug. 21, 2007, sea ice extent was 1.89 million
square miles. The magenta line shows the median
August sea ice extent based on data from 1979 to
2000. Credit: NSIDC

A vast expanse of frozen ocean as large as New Mexico disappeared from the Arctic Ocean during the past week, reducing the polar ice cap to the smallest extent ever recorded by satellite.

The Perfect Melt goes on.

Satellites recorded 4.92 million square kilometers (or 1.89 million square miles) on Aug. 21 — 131,000 square miles less than the coverage on Aug. 17 and far below the “previous lowest absolute minimum” extent of 5.32 million square kilometers or 2.05 million square miles recorded on September 20–21 of 2005, according to new figures and charts posted online Aug. 22 by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Arctic ice cover has now slid about 8 percent below its previous all-time record low set 25 months ago.

This unprecedented retraction — occurring with another month to go before Arctic melting season ends in late September — is bad news for ice-subsisting animals like polar bears, walrus and seals. And the absence of the natural armor provided by solid ice exposes barrier island villages like Shishmaref and Kivalina to catastrophic erosion during fall storms.

But one aspect to all this floe-grinding isn’t a complete catastrophe in itself: the fabled Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic islands could open to ship traffic.

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A NASA satellite has captured these noctilucent or
“night shining” clouds on June 11, 2007. … Very little
is known about how these clouds form over the poles.
Credit: Cloud Imaging Team, U. of Colorado/NASA

Dozens of international scientists are meeting this week in Fairbanks to tackle one of the most mysterious indicators of changing climate in the Arctic — the strange, high clouds that etch the dimming sky above the setting sun.

They’re called noctilucent clouds, and they form at least 50 miles above the surface for reasons scientists have not figured out. Not well documented until a few decades ago, the strange euphemeral bands of crystals are only one of the weird phenomena seen in the mesosphere, the coldest and least studied region of the atmosphere.

As a result, some scientists have called it the “ignorosphere” This untouchable zone ranges from about 30 miles up to about 55 miles out — too high for aircraft and too low for spacecraft and orbiting satellites. But the advent of rocket technology, remote sensing and satellite coverage has peeled back some of its details.

The Eighth International Workshop on Layered Phenomena in the Mesopause Region has brought together dozens of the people in pursuit of these mesopheric mysteries at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Among other bizarre tidbits from the planet’s air ocean, they will consider airborne soot and wafting meteoric dust, as well as the fantastic rippling of gravity waves and atmospheric tides. Who knew?

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Pavlof summit viewed from the east on Aug. 18
Credit: Cyrys Read, AVO/USGS

The eruption of a 8,261-foot volcano along the Alaska Peninsula southwest of Anchorage continues to dribble molten rock down its slopes, trigger steaming lahars and spit small ash clouds into the air.

Pavlof Volcano — one of the most active cones in the world — awoke last week with a dramatic explosion that appears to have legs.

“Steady earthquake activity and flow events continue to be recorded,” the AVO reported in its Aug. 20 status update. “A thermal anomaly was seen in satellite data. An AVO field party witnesses a lahar flowing down the southeast flank of the volcano.”

The Alaska Volcano Observatory continues to rate the volcano’s aviation hazard at the Orange level, meaning that the eruption isn’t currently sending ash into flight zones but could at any time. Volcanic ash can damage or shutdown jet aircraft.

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Pleistocene wolf skulls from Rancho La Brea
(in present day L.A.), California (above) and Fairbanks
(middle). Though the skulls are the same length, their
shape is different: the wolf skull from Alaska is wider,
suggesting those wolves had greater biting power.
Credit: Blaire Van Valkenburgh, University of California, Los Angeles

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.

An Alaska wolf that disappeared about 12,000 years ago just made another appearance.

No one will ever see this wolf, but scientists have found that it was different from Alaska’s wolves of today, and it was not like its Ice-Age contemporaries that lived in, among other places, Los Angeles.

Blaire Van Valkenburgh is a UCLA researcher who lives and studies very close to the La Brea Tar Pits in downtown Los Angeles. She and her colleagues compared DNA from wolves that perished in Interior Alaska during the last Ice Age with DNA from living wolves. The Alaska DNA samples came from bones and skulls exposed by Fairbanks miners as they tore away frozen soil to get at gold-bearing gravels beneath. Staff at the American Museum of Natural History came to Fairbanks from the 1920s to the 1940s to gather the bones and bring them back to the museum in New York.

The Alaska wolves surprised the researchers by being unlike the wolves running around Alaska right now. By looking at the DNA from wolf teeth attached to the skulls found in the permafrost (samples from teeth do the least damage to skulls), the scientists found the Alaska wolves had no relationship to modern wolves.

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USFWS

The floating ice of the Arctic Ocean has shrunk to the smallest extent ever observed by satellites for a single day — with a full month to go before the normal end of melt season.

From Aug. 16 to Aug. 17, the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by at least 85 percent ice has never been smaller.

“Arctic sea ice has now surpassed all previous records for the lowest absolute minimum extent,” reported the National Snow and Ice Data Center in its Aug. 17 dispatch.

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CU-Boulder researchers are monitoring dwindling sea ice in the Arctic.

With ice watchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center reporting unprecedented meltback of Arctic Ocean ice this summer, ice forecasters at the University of Colorado at Boulder say the worst is yet to come.

In a release posted on-line Aug. 16, UCB researchers with the Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group say the lack of thick multi-year ice makes it virtually certain that September will deliver the all-time minimum for polar ice in the Arctic.

What are the odds? It’s grim — 92 percent. Here’s more:

The researchers, who forecast in April a 33 percent chance the September minimum of sea ice would set a new record, dramatically revised their prediction following a rapid disintegration of sea ice during July, said Research Associate Sheldon Drobot of CU-Boulder’s Colorado Center for Astrodynamics.

“During the first week in July, the Arctic sea ice started to disappear at rates we had never seen before,” said Drobot, who leads CCAR’s Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group in CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department.

“We have been seeing a sharp decline in thicker, multi-year ice that has survived more than one melt season,” said CCAR Research Associate James Maslanik. “This has been replaced in many areas by a thin, first-year layer of ice as well as by younger, thinner types of multi-year ice. The thinner ice just does not have the mass to withstand the effects of warming climate.”

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Credit: NCDC

It’s hot out there. And getting hotter. Just ask the NOAA climate dudes.

Capped by an exceptionally warm July, the Northern Hemisphere sweltered through the warmest seven-month period of the past 127 years, with temperatures averaging 1.37 °F above the long-term average, according to a new report posted online by the National Climate Data Center.

The southern hemisphere was somewhat cooler during the same January-to-July period, but the record heat over Northern continents kept the kettle aboil, so to speak. Average global temperatures for the first seven months of 2007 ended as the second warmest seen since 1880, tying with 2002 and 2005, and beaten only by 1998.

All this news comes as ice watchers report an unprecedented decline in polar floes on the Arctic Ocean, with ice extent never smaller for this date during three decades of satellite coverage. A driver in the Arctic decline was the high temperatures along the coast of Alaska and Far Eastern Russia.

Credit: NCDC

Parsing out what this new sizzle means can get dizzy. One hot year does not a climate bake. But the drumbeat of new records, starting last winter, with temperatures consistently at record or near record levels, does seem to raise the stakes in the global climate debate over reducing greenhouse emissions.

An antidote for nonsense and misinterpretation can be ingested by reviewing actual climate data — albeit translated into layman’s terms by agency science writers. The National Climate Data Center and the Alaska Climate Research Center are good first stops, followed by a visit to RealClimate.Org to peruse interpretations by climate scientists.