Far North Science

Pink salmon fry infected with sea lice.
Credit: Alexandra Morton

Lice infestations that originated in fish farms off British Columbia will almost certainly drive certain natural pink salmon runs to extinction within a few years, according to a new study published this week in the journal of Science.

The findings add to evidence that raising salmon and other fish in ocean pens, banned from Alaska and controversial in the Pacific Northwest, can cause environmental damage and spread nonindigenous stocks, disease or parasites into wild populations. The study has already garnered extensive coverage by media, especially in Canada, and detailed critiques from the aquaculture industry and some academics.

The Vancouver Sun covered the study in depth in this dispatch.

The article’s authors, including University of Alberta researcher Martin Krkosek and B.C.’s Alexandra Morton, looked at 37 years’ worth of Fisheries and Oceans data for 71 central coast rivers and found that wild pink runs have comfortably withstood decades of commercial fishing — but cannot survive fish farms.

“We have seen is a very rapid four year decline in the pink salmon populations in the Broughton,” Krkosek said in an interview earlier this week.

“Based on that measured rate of decline, which is real, we can expect that in another four years those fish will be all gone if the sea lice infestations continue.”

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Modern gray wolf
Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons

Thus read the headline of the Jan. 26, 1950 edition of the Anchorage Daily News. Longtime Alaskan man of God Everett Bachelder had been driving a team of dogs from Palmer to the Copper Basin with a load of supplies and gifts for orphans and needy families when wolves surrounded his outfit stalled in deep snow near Sheep Mountain, near the headwaters of the Matanuska River.

“An Alaskan missionary today revealed how he made a harrowing escape from death when hungry wolves surrounded his dog team on a crosscountry trek from Wasilla to Chitina,” the story reads.

“His dogs were devoured, and he had to keep a campfire going throughout every night to save himself from the vicious beasts.”

Bachelder survived, of course, going on to serve many years as a missionary in Nome. And times have changed in the past half century — no longer do people cast wolves in absurdly purple terms like ‘vicious beasts.’

But it’d be an equally absurd mistake to see wolves — those magnificent, intelligent and socially sophisticated predators — as spiritual creatures guided by ecological action-plans that target only the infirm and weak. The animals have a mission from God: Eat meat. And that can mean killing dogs.

One of the four wolf packs known to roam Alaska’s largest municipality — animals that often prowl within sight of humans on Anchorage trails — has been stalking and attacking pets running lose near owners. In two of the four incidents reported this week by the Anchorage Daily News, dogs were actually consumed. Dogs have also been killed recently by wolves in Fairbanks.

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Alaska gasoline is high in benzene, which makes
an attached garage a bad place to store gasoline-
powered engines.
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.

Because of our gasoline and our climate, Alaskans who live in homes with attached garages are at higher risk of exposure to harmful chemicals in the air. A few scientists are trying to find out the size of that risk.

Mary Ellen Gordian of Anchorage is a physician and a professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage who is beginning a study of benzene levels in which she hopes to test 400 local homes. In a preliminary study of Anchorage homes with attached garages, she found that one-third of the air samples from those homes had unhealthy levels of benzene.

“We had families exposed to levels way above the minimal risk level for acute exposure, and they’re being exposed to it 24-7 because it’s in their home,” she said.

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Rhodiola grows in the Arctic

They call it Golden Root, a delicate yellow flower from mountain slopes in the European and Asian Arctic that has a storied reputation for boosting mood during the long dark of Siberian winters.

But the mysterious Rhodiola rosea may actually pack for more punch in its pharmacological fist.

A new study from the University of California at Irvine found Rhodiola increased the lifespan of fruit flies, suggesting that this Far North herb prized by Chinese traditional medicine might make people live longer too.

“Flies that ate a diet rich with Rhodiola rosea, an herbal supplement long used for its purported stress-relief effects, lived on an average of 10 percent longer than fly groups that didn’t eat the herb,” states an on-line story published by UCI this week.

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Source: NSIDC

After shrinking to its smallest summer extent in modern times, the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean has slowly begun to refreeze. By the end of November, the new ice and floes had grown enough to cover an estimated 3.9 million square miles, according new online analyses posted this week by the National Snow and Ice Data Center ice index.

Remember, sea ice bottomed out at about 1.59 million square miles in September — reflecting the utter dissolution of a summer ice habitat the size of California and Texas combined.

Over the past two months, the frozen world has almost doubled. The Arctic’s November ice no longer sizzles in record territory: 2006 had slightly less ice cover. So this is good news? Not especially.

Don’t forget that November 2007 extent covers only 90 percent of the 4.3 million square miles normally covered by this time of year, based on the 1971-2000 mean.

Making matters worse, the missing ice has left the Chukchi Sea largely wide open, a situation that has threatened several Native villages with erosion during storms.

Source: NSIDC

The latest charts and analysis from ice desk at the National Weather Service in Anchorage shows a vast reach of open water stretching northwest of the Seward Peninsula.

Still, an expected plunge in temperatures could start filling in the northern Chukchi Sea, according to the text analysis.

The most recent chart posted online by the National Ice Center provides the same Chukchi information in color.

Source: NSIDC

From the prowlings of narwhals and belugas, to the plight of intrepid grass-eating pikas in St. Elias mountain refuges, to the stunning brown-death of 40 million white spruce in Kluane National Park, senior writer Ed Struzik of the Edmonton Herald takes readers on a journey across the Far North in search of climate change impact.

Appearing as The Big Thaw in the Herald and Arctic in Peril in the Toronto Star, the eight-part series (plus photo galleries, interactive maps and commentary) climaxed this week.

Struzik, a 28-year Arctic journalist, was sponsored by the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, the Beland Honderich Family and the Toronto Star. Beginning in July, he made nine Arctic journeys to report the series, according to an update posted online about the 2007 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.

“He travelled by plane, icebreaker, snowmobile, dogsled and skis, making his way from Churchill, Man., to Ellesmere Island, and from the Alaskan border to the coast of Greenland. Struzik saw first-hand evidence that the Arctic is warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the world.”

The multi-media slide show, with audio commentary, are alone worth a few megabytes of time and bandwidth.

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Tara has spent two winters in the ice

Let’s check in on one of the most interesting Far North expeditions now underway — a boat and crew trapped on purpose in the Arctic ice.

In the deep blackness of the polar night, the research schooner Tara and its crew of a dozen well-insulated scientists have been drifting for the past 15 months and now are veering mile by mile with Arctic ice toward the frigid waters of the North Atlantic Ocean.

With a rounded, flat hull, and reinforced structure, the ship embedded itself in polar ice in September of 2006. With scientists measuring ice thickness and taking observations, the boat traveled with floes about 5.7 miles per day during the first 12 months. In the end, Tara has moved about 870 miles across the Arctic — yet actually covered a more than of 2,100 miles due to the zigzag vagaries of the ice cap.

On May 28, the vessel slipped north of 88 North — within 100 miles of the geographic North Pole. Over the summer, the ship began drifting south faster than expected, and could reach open water within the next few weeks. (This emergence is a topic of keen interest to the crew.

“Despite all of the chatter, modeling, predictions and general banter, we just don’t know how things will pan out,” they wrote on Nov. 21. “That’s part of the magic of being stuck up here, to be living in a world that is not governed by bus timetables and the certitudes of what tomorrow will bring.”

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Coals from the firebox of Bill Reynolds’ masonry heater.
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.

With the rising price of heating oil, some people are looking to the past for ways to heat their homes.

Masonry heaters, huge masses of stonework wrapped around a sinuous channel through which hot gases flow, are now appearing in Alaska homes. The clean-burning, efficient heaters existed for centuries in Europe and Scandinavia, but didn’t reach the shores of America until after the oil crisis of the 1970s.

Bill Reynolds and his wife Brenda Norcross of Fairbanks have heated their 1,400-square-foot house with a masonry heater for more than two winters. Reynolds said they have used two-and-one-half to three cords of wood per year to heat their home, which stays at a constant 70-to-72 degrees Fahrenheit in winter.

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