Far North Science

News, research and natural acts from Alaska

November 30th, 2007

Alaskan birds in jeopardy

usfwskittlitzs_murrelet.jpg
Kittlitz’s murrelet
Source: USFWS / Wikipedia Commons

A mysterious seabird that forages at the face of shrinking tidewater glaciers highlights the 12 Alaska species red-listed as critical by the Audubon’s 2007 Watchlist, released this week and posted online.

The little-known Kittlitz’s murrelet — a species so elusive that scientists didn’t record its croaking call for the first time until a few years ago— has crashed by more than 80 percent since the 1970s throughout its icy range rimming the Gulf of Alaska.

The birds, genetic cousins to puffins and murres, spend summers diving for food in the meltwater rivers that flush from glacial faces, while nesting in the mountains on the ground. Almost nothing is known about their ecology and life cycle — only a few dozen nesting sites have ever been documented and no one really knows much about where the birds spend winters.

Yet the shrinkage of glaciers, and the rapid increase in freshwater at glacial faces, appears to have decimated the bird’s food sources or made it much more difficult to snatch eats. Example: Something like 63,000 murrelets were thought to summer in Prince William Sound in the 1970s. By 2000, the number had dropped to an estimated 1,000.

It’s possible that the world population of the murrelets is now as low as 7,000, according to 2004 estimates.

“The fate of the Kittlitz’s murrelet likely hinges on the fate of Alaska’s glaciers, and therefore may be among the world’s first avian species to succumb to effects of rising global temperatures,” wrote federal biologists John Piatt and Kathy Kuletz in a 2004 scientific paper.

They called it “Alaska’s avian ‘poster child’ for global climate change.”

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November 29th, 2007

Yet more alarming climate signals

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Full moon over Arctic ice north of Russia in 2006
Source: Mike Dunn / NOAA NABOS 2006 Expedition

Here are some clues that Arctic climate change no longer moves at a glacial pace:

  • The Arctic Ocean is losing its sea ice faster, with September recording the smallest extent in modern history. It beat the previous minimum seen in 2005 by 23 percent — losing an area as large as Texas and California combined.
  • This loss of ice is moving faster than predictions, accelerating beyond the pace suggested by rising greenhouse gas concentrations.
  • The remaining ice is thinner, more fragile, more vulnerable to melting in future summers.
  • Get ready polar bears and Native hunters: An ice-free Arctic Ocean could arrive by 2030 — about half a century ahead of previous worst-case, nightmare scenarios.

These startling details came out during a Nov. 26 panel discussion at the Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, D.C., called Arctic Sea Ice Melt and Shrinking Polar Ice Sheets: Are Observed Changes Exceeding Expectations?

The forum — which included the senior research scientist Mark Serreze from the National Snow and Ice Data Center — was part of the Environmental Science Seminar Series sponsored by the American Meteorological Society.

Among other things, the presentation detailed how Alaskan glaciers, western and peninsula Antarctic ice and the Greenland ice sheet have both been thinning, losing mass and melting back faster than scientists predicted.

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November 27th, 2007

Pacific walrus forced to shore

walrussingleusfws.jpg
Pacific walrus
Source: USFWS

The summer meltback of the Arctic Ocean ice to the smallest extent in modern history wiped out the ice floes used by Pacific walruses as resting and hunting platforms over shallow water, forcing an extraordinary congregation of the tusked behemoths along the Russian Chukchi coast, according to a report by the World Wildlife Fund.

In a phenomenon first reported in the Russian Arctic a few years ago, something like 40,000 walruses hauled out near Ryrkarphy village on Kozehvnikov Cape, on the Chukotka Peninsula west of Alaska, according to an Oct. 10 dispatch posted online by WWF Russia.

The unprecedented gathering prompted Russian conservationists to push for some sort of nature preserve, and education, to protect the animals from hunting and harassment, the WWF release stated.

“Because of climate change, nowadays ice almost disappears from the Chukotka and East Siberian seas in summer”, says Viktor Nikiforov, WWF-Russia Regional Programmes Director.

“Multiyear Arctic ice moves northward, which means that in the coming years new haul-outs will appear on Chukotka Arctic coast. Walruses become exhausted after swimming hundreds of kilometers from pack ice to the coast, without a chance to rest. The sea without ice cover has frequent storms, which may lead to deaths of a large number of young walruses. Our common goal is to help walruses survive in this difficult time”.

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November 26th, 2007

Strange Alaska rivers bisect mountain range

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Nenana River north of Healy
Source: USGS Yukon Mercury Project

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.

Alaska’s landscape has an unusual feature that allows us to enjoy cheap bananas in Fairbanks and other things that make life better in the subarctic.

The Nenana River, born on the south side of the Alaska Range, makes a U-turn and flows north through the mountains. With it comes a wide, low corridor that has favored construction of both the Alaska Railroad and the Parks Highway.

“Ordinarily, a mountain range is a pretty good barrier,” said Don Triplehorn, a man curious about many things and a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He recently described the curious behavior of the Nenana.

“It flows out to the south, downhill as any decent river should, but then it turns west and then north, past McKinley,” Triplehorn said “That’s really unusual.”

And the Nenana River isn’t the only major waterway cutting through the Alaska Range. The Delta River does the same thing, originating south of the Alaska Range but then flowing north through the mountains.

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November 21st, 2007

Sorting Pacific salmon by DNA

Sockeye salmon
Salmon, such as this sockeye, spend years in the ocean
before returning to their home waters to spawn. A newly
launched $4.1 million project aims to make it easier for
scientists to discern populations of salmon from one and
other using the latest genetic techniques.
Source: Thomas Quinn/University of Washington

A sockeye is a sockeye is a sockeye. Agree? One fish, one species, one flippin’ recipe.

Or not. Each individual Nerka return into the thousands of rivers along the Pacific Rim furthers a unique genetic heritage, an unreplicated DNA fingerprint, that spawns a fish unlike any other in the ocean.

Alaskans know this well. Those who desire their red-fleshed protein with a touch of lemon pepper and garlic can hold forth in detail on the differences among salmon.

Slip a chunk of oily Copper River sockeye over the tongue. A slow chew reveals … Fudge. Next fork up some belly meat off a Kenai River red. It’s firm and wholesome, filling. But wait. What about the Coghill River reds that cross Prince William Sound? Or Copper River’s Gulkana, Klutina and Tonsina fish? Or the Tustumena-bound sockeyes swimming the Kasilof?

So many flavors, so few barbecues.

To help all of us Pacific humans keep track of (and conserve) the myriad varieties of our Pacific salmon, a team of scientists at the University of Washington have launched an ambitious project to decipher this wild encyclopedia of DNA and then share the index.

“A $4.1 million effort just launched by UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences aims to help by gathering genetic information for thousands upon thousands of Pacific Rim salmon populations and creating open-access databases for managers, treaty-makers and scientists,” according to a UW online story.

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November 20th, 2007
Updated November 20, 2007 @ 9:59 am

Alaska’s top CO2 producers

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Fort Wainwright Central Heating and Power Plant
Source: USACE

Consider the truism: Think Globally, Act Locally.

With the weekend release of the synthesis report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — warning of a planetary catastrophe that will hit the Arctic hard — snow-drenched Alaskans ought to mull over carbon emissions produced by the state’s 241 power plants and consider whether any of them can be reduced or even eliminated.

For instance: Two military powerplants in Fairbanks rank among the “dirtiest” facilities in the United States — in terms of the total carbon emissions spewed per megawatt of electricity produced, according to a new report posted online by the group Carbon Monitoring for Action.

The report — with an easily searchable database — also lists a number of relatively tiny power plants in Alaska villages that share the same top-of-the-scale “intensity” for emissions-per-megawatt. Even though their total emissions remain miniscule on the world stage.

Not so for the military facilities. Both the Eielson Air Force Base plant and the Fort Wainwright Central Heating and Power Plant produce about 6,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt of electricity. That’s more than five times the emission intensity of the state’s largest electrical producer, the gas turbine plant operated by Chugach Electric Association at Beluga.

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November 18th, 2007

Arctic doomsday seed vault powers up

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A drawing of the Svalbard Seed Vault
Source: Global Seed Trust

A high-tech vault built 400 feet inside permafrost and solid rock on the Arctic coast of Spitzbergen Island has started to cool down its sandstone chambers to zero degrees Farhenheit in preparation for an incredible mission:

Archive up to 4.5 million seeds — the genetic source for all of the crops that feed humanity — in an ultimate fail-safe, blast-proof and climate-change immune chamber.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust announced that it has completed construction of the doomsday vault and has started the two-month countdown to ready the facility to protect the world’s agricultural heritage against extinction and calamity.

“The seed vault is the perfect place for keeping seeds safe for centuries,” said Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Rome-based group, which has partnered with Norway and the Nordic Gene Bank on the establishment of the vault. “At these (frigid) temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 10,000 years.”

“We really want this facility to inspire, to stand out as a highly visible monument to the often obscure but very important mission of conserving humanity’s agriculture heritage,” added Mr. Terje Riis-Johansen, Norway’s Minister of Agriculture and Food.

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November 17th, 2007
Updated November 17, 2007 @ 9:07 am

Climate change: Not always about temperatures

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Source: NCDC

Here’s a climate conundrum for Alaskans. Even as the home planet continues to sizzle through one of the warmest years on record — with unprecedented sea ice shrinkage and the warmest Northern Hemisphere ever seen — America’s Arctic state hardly warmed at all.

Alaska’s most recent climate stats once again show cooler average temperatures than those seen globally or even in the contiguous U.S. (Excepting Barrow and Alaska’s northwest Arctic Coast, where open water continues to keep things exceptionally warm.)

The figures published last week by the National Climate Data Center won’t exactly trigger head-for-the-bunker panic among the pocket-protector types in the supercomputer labs. Consider:

  • Alaska had its 37th coolest October since records began in 1918, with a temperature 0.23 °F above the 1971-to-2000 average.
  • Alaska had its 17th warmest August-October on record, with a temperature 2.03 °F above the 1971-to-2000 average.
  • Alaska had its 24th warmest January-October on record, with a temperature 0.58 °F above the 1971-to-2000 average.

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