Far North Science

It’s official. A frozen habitat as large as Argentina — an area 1.5 times the size of Alaska — has disappeared from the summer Arctic world.

The Arctic Ocean pack likely bottomed out on Sept. 16 with the smallest ice extent and greatest reach of open water in modern history. The slow winter refreeze appears to have begun — although a full recovery of the planet’s air conditioner from 2007’s huge decline isn’t likely.

Left image shows 2007. Right image shows previous record
in 2005. Purple line shows 1979-2000 average.

See larger image at NSIDC
Source: NSIDC

How low did it go? The area with at least 15 percent ice cover retreated to 1.59 million square miles — about 22.5 percent less than the previous all-time minimum of 2.05 million square miles observed two Septembers ago.

“The minimum for 2007 shatters the previous five-day minimum set on September 20–21, 2005, by 1.19 million square kilometers (460,000 square miles), roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five United Kingdoms,” the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported in its latest fall ice dispatch.

Read on » » » »

Bar-tailed Godwit gets transmitter
Source: USGS

A female shorebird that summered in the Alaskan tundra just completed an epic journey across the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand, completing the longest non-stop flight ever recorded for a bird that nests and feeds on land.

The Bar-tailed Godwit — with the nickname “E-7″ — alighted near the mouth of a small river on the North Island on Sept. 7, only a few miles from where she had been captured in the spring and fitted with a satellite transmitter.

Over the previous seven months, the bird had taken an 18,000-mile migration that touched down in China and Alaska. Most extraordinary of all was a non-stop, eight-day flight from Alaska to New Zealand.

The bird flew 7,200 miles without touching the ground.

The study, led by shorebird team with the Alaska Biological Science Center in Anchorage and Massey University in New Zealand and others, is part of a larger investigation into the migrations of shorebirds in the Pacific and their potential to carry the H5N1 bird flu and other diseases from one hemisphere to another.

Read on » » » »

Do I look scratchy to you?
Credit: FWS / Image Library

It’s part of Far North lore: Brown bears will back up to a particularly craggy spruce and rub their massive rumps back and forth, up and down. They will scratch and bite. Leave behind hair and claw marks. Same trees, same bears, year after year, generation after generation.

Hmmmm, you imagine them grunting. That feels so good.

But science has once more ruined another common sense notion and made things much more complicated. It turns out that bears don’t do the arboreal cha-cha-cha just because all that rank, greasy fur has gotten itchy. Or even because they want to mark territory, exactly.

A British scientist who monitored several of these “rubbing trees” in British Columbia via remote infrared cameras and satellite uplink says he’s found the real reason.

As you probably guessed, it’s all about scratching that other itch.

Read on » » » »

Satellite mosiac of the Arctic Ocean in early
Sept. 2007, clearly showing the most direct
route of the Northwest Passage open (orange line)
and the Northeast passage only partially blocked (blue line).
The dark gray colour represents the ice-free areas, while
green represents areas with sea ice.

Credits: European Space Agency

The incredible retreat of the Arctic ice pack eroded further into record territory this past week, dissolving hundreds of miles of perennial floes into open water, and offering a satellite view of the most navigable Northwest Passage ever seen.

Still, the rate of decline slowed — only about 38,000 square miles melted away during the past seven days, an area larger than Indiana — suggesting the Perfect Melt may be close to hitting bottom for the season, according to the latest dispatch from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

As of Sept. 16, the extent of ice covered about 1.63 million square miles — the smallest polar cap since satellite monitoring began in 1978. The area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 percent ice coverage was 22 percent smaller than than the previous all-time record minimum of 2.05 million square miles, set on Sept. 20-21 of 2005.

Vast areas of the Arctic are now known to be ice free for the first time in history.

The NSIDC reports in the latest fall update:

Source: NSIDC

The main, deep channel of the Northwest Passage (Lancaster Sound to M’Clure Strait) has been open, or nearly ice-free, for about five weeks (since August 11, approximately).

Of note is the northernmost ice edge ever recorded, at 85.5 degrees North, near the 160 degrees east longitude line.

Sea ice is still declining, although the rate is very slow at present. Sea ice extent at this time of year can vary from day to day, as regions within the Arctic have small episodes of melt, freeze, or wind movement of the ice, just before the strong autumn cooling.

Read on » » » »

Source: NASA

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 any clear, dark night you can see them, gliding through the sky and reflecting sunlight from the other side of the world. Manmade satellites now orbit our planet by the thousands, and it’s hard to stargaze without seeing one.

The inky black upper atmosphere was less busy 50 years ago, when a few young scientists stepped out of a trailer near Fairbanks to look up into the cold October sky. Gazing upward, they saw the moving dot that started it all, the Russian-launched Sputnik 1.

Those Alaskans, working for the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, were the first North American scientists to see the satellite, which was the size and shape of a basketball, and, at 180 pounds, weighed about as much as a point guard.

The Alaska researchers studied radio astronomy at the campus in Fairbanks. They had their own tracking station in a clearing in the forest near Ballaine Lake on the northern portion of university land. This station, set up to study the aurora and other features of the upper atmosphere, enabled the scientists to be ready when a reporter called the institute with news of the Russians’ secret launch of the world’s first manmade satellite.

Read on » » » »

Meet Scuttles, the first red-legged
kittiwake born in captivity
Credit: Jason Wettstein

The Alaska Sea Life Center didn’t just sponsor the first-ever successful captive breeding of the threatened (and mysterious) Steller’s eider. Along with love among eiders, the biologists also served as match-maker for red-legged kittiwakes.

In what may be the first successful hatch of a red-legged kittiwake in captivity, a tiny chick nicknamed Scuttles pecked into the world on July 17.

This is a big deal in the world of seabird science. Black-legged kittiwakes wing all over coastal Alaska — perching on dock pilings, screeching off cliff-side nests, wheeling among flocks of other sea-gull-like predators on shore and harbor.

But red-legged kittiwakes are one of the rarest and most exotic birds on the planet, limited to five or six rugged cliff faces on remote islands in the Bering Sea.

Listed as a Species of Concern under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and endangered in Russia, the species has undergone dramatic declines for reasons that remain unclear.

Read on » » » »

Arctic Ocean this summer
Credit: Florian Breier-Alfred Wegener Institute

A international team of scientists have found the Arctic Ocean ice has been growing ever thinner — accompanied by changes in marine life and disturbing shifts in deep ocean currents.

A scientific expedition that spent the past two-and-half-months taking measurements across the Arctic reported this week that vast pans of ice measure only one meter thick — suggesting a 50 percent decrease in overall ice thickness since 2001.

These results were gathered by some of the 50 scientists from 10 countries aboard the research vessel Polarstern, sponsored by the German-based Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.

“The ice cover in the North Polar Sea is dwindling, the ocean and the atmosphere are becoming steadily warmer, the ocean currents are changing,” said chief scientist Dr Ursula Schauer, in a story posted on-line.

The observations surfaced amid a flurry of other climate-change news, highlighted by a Perfect Melt that shrank Arctic sea ice to the smallest extent ever reserved. As of Sept. 10, an area the size of California was free of ice cover for the first time in history, according to the lastest dispatch from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Meanwhile, U.S. climate monitors reported the Northern Hemisphere simmered through its warmest January-to-August period since the 1880s. And the Chukchi Sea village of Kivalina — one of the Alaska communities facing dangerous erosion due storm waves that build on an ocean that lacks protective ice — was evacuating some residents in advance of a big storm.

Read on » » » »

Source: NCDC

The North has never been hotter. Here are the latest stats from the National Climate Data Center.

Driven by the warmth over the land masses of the Northern Hemisphere, the home planet just steamed through the eighth warmest August on record and the fourth warmest January-to-August period, according a new climate report posted on Sept. 12.

The driver of this statistical simmer appears to be record average temperatures in Asia, Europe and North America. During the past seven months, northern land masses averaged 2.29 °F above normal, beating the previous record of 2.07 °F above normal set in 2002.

Rising .2 °F might seem like a miniscule change while sitting in a garden chair with your toes in the grass, but it’s a stunning shift for steppe, desert, taiga, plains and forest. The result?

During the past seven months, the Northern Hemisphere has averaged 1.35 °F above the long-term average — the warmest January-to-August period ever recorded.

Read on » » » »