Far North Science

The Alaska marmot at Slope Mountain
in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range.
Photo by Dave Robichaud.

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.

One million dollars or a summer in the hills chasing Alaska marmots? Not many people have to make this choice, but Aren Gunderson is not like most people.

Gunderson, 27, lives in Fairbanks, in a cabin with no running water. He is tall, athletic, adventurous, and probably would do well on the reality television show Survivor, where contestants test their tenacity and social skills on a tropical island. The last person standing gets $1 million.

Upon the urging of his sister, Rane Cortez of Washington D.C., Gunderson, a student working on a master’s degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, made an audition video for the producers of Survivor.

In his three-minute film, the shaggy-haired Gunderson is seen dog mushing and, with his snow-covered outhouse as a backdrop, ranting as to why he needs a million dollars.

Read on » » » »

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

By the tens of thousands, the seeds will come: strains of Mexican maize, sturdy varieties of African wheat, Southeast Asian rice that feeds the masses. They’re what one scientist calls “the crown jewels” of the world’s agricultural heritage, all of them on now getting packaged at facilities around the world for shipping to Svalbard, in the Norwegian Arctic.

Destination? What may be the world’s most secure biological archive, a climate-controlled vault blasted into solid rock and permafrost as a place to forever house samples in the event of war, drought or ecological disaster.

It’s called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, what some have started calling the Doomsday Vault. Constructed over the past year, and powered up in November by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the facility will begin its seed-protection mission in February 2008.

“Our ability to endow this facility with such an impressive array of diversity is a powerful testament to the incredible work of scientists at our centers, who have been so dedicated to ensuring the survival of the world’s most important crop species,” said Emile Frison, director general of Rome-based Bioversity International, a sponsor of the project.

Read on » » » »

Hubbard Glacier north of Yakutat crept to within
100 yards of Gilbert Point in June of 2007.
George Kalli took this photo in May 2007.

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.

As you read this, a rogue glacier is again threatening a small town.

Hubbard Glacier crept to within a football-field distance of ramming into Gilbert Point last June, and some scientists say that a spring 2008 closure of Russell Fiord “may be eminent.”

Roman Motyka, a research professor with the University of Alaska Southeast and the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, gives Hubbard a 50-50 chance of plugging the entrance to Russell Fiord this spring.

Hubbard Glacier dips its tongue into salt water about 40 miles north of Yakutat, Alaska, home to about 600 people. Fed by fields of ice so immense that the glacier will rumble forward regardless of how warm the planet gets in the near future, Hubbard Glacier made headlines in 2002 when it bulldozed gravel into Gilbert Point, pinching off Russell Fiord’s link to the sea and creating the largest glacier-dammed lake in the world. Before the gravel dam broke, water within the lake rose more than eight inches each day and threatened to spill into a world-class steelhead stream near Yakutat.

Hubbard Glacier has been thickening and advancing since scientists first measured it in 1895. After the glacier dammed the fiord in 1986, the new Russell Lake rose 83 feet above sea level before the ice-and-gravel dam broke.

In 2002, Russell Lake reached 49 feet above sea level before the dam burst and the water rejoined the ocean with a flood 30 percent greater than the largest measured flow of the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge.

Read on » » » »

NASA: Sea ice minimum / summer 2007

Arctic Ocean ice has thinned dramatically during the past few years, with vast quantities of stable multi-year ice flushing into oblivion out in the Atlantic Ocean.

Replacing these reliable royal-blue floes built over many years — the literal bedrock of the Arctic ice habitat — are weak pans formed during one or two seasons at a time.

Credit: UNEP

As this older ice increasingly “gives way” to the younger and thinner ice, the Arctic becomes more prone to another unprecedented meltback similar to the 2007 season, when ice cover set an all-time minimum record, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

“This thinner, younger ice makes the Arctic much more susceptible to rapid melt,” said Research Professor James Maslanik in an online story. “Our concern is that if the Arctic continues to get kicked hard enough toward one physical state, it becomes increasingly difficult to reestablish the sea ice conditions of 20 or 30 years ago.”

Read on » » » »