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 » » » »

A winter sunrise on Alaska’s Arctic coast in 1949
Source: NOAA photo library

With the specter of rising temperatures and meltdown of summer sea ice haunting Alaska’s climate outlook, a dollop of liquid cold gave Barrow a startling surprise last month.

The sun rose on Dec. 1, weeks after its official disappearance, according to the Alaska Climate Research Center in a dispatch about the 12th month’s climate in the Far North state.

In a rare optical effect, there was looming of the sun above the horizon at Barrow on the first of December On this date the sun is always well below the horizon at Barrow, having set for the winter one week prior.

This time, however, very cold air near the ground refracted the suns rays northward beyond their usual range. In addition, some clouds formed about 6 miles above sea level, and provided a mirror to reflect the suns image north to Barrow.

So, even though Barrow was theoretically dark on the first of December, it was quite bright this year, even though the almanacs do not show the sun rising there until the 23rd of January.

Read on » » » »

This still image from an animation shows the temperature
anomalies that were present during 2007. Note the Arctic.
Source: NASA GISS

With January’s chill comes the season of the annual temperature scorecards for the home planet. Both the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Climate Data Center say 2007 delivered some of the warmest average temperatures on record for the globe and United States. Each agency produced slightly different results.

Was 2007 the second warmest year on record? Or the fifth? And what about the United States?

Here’s one answer, from the NCDC:

The average U.S. temperature for 2007 was 54.2 °F; 1.4 °F warmer than the 20th century mean of 52.8 °F. NCDC originally estimated in mid-December that 2007 would end as the eighth warmest on record, but below-average temperatures in areas of the country last month lowered the annual ranking.

For Alaska, 2007 was the 15th warmest year since statewide records began in 1918.

One thing’s for sure. The trend line has continued to lurch upward. For up, and for those of us at the high latitudes, where the sun never abandons June yet hardly shines in December, 2007 clearly was another sign that climate change continues its acceleration.

From the GISS story:

The greatest warming in 2007 occurred in the Arctic, and neighboring high latitude regions. Global warming has a larger affect in polar areas, as the loss of snow and ice leads to more open water, which absorbs more sunlight and warmth.

Snow and ice reflect sunlight; when they disappear, so too does their ability to deflect warming rays. The large Arctic warm anomaly of 2007 is consistent with observations of record low geographic extent of Arctic sea ice in September 2007.

Read on » » » »

Bear Glacier on the Kenai Peninsula floating
on a lake of its own creation, photographed in
2005 by Bruce Molnia, USGS.

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.

Here’s more Alaska-related news from the notebook after a week at the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco:

In autumn 2007, temperatures north of Alaska over the Arctic Ocean were about 10 degrees Celsius warmer than longtime averages, and in November there was still open water on the Chukchi Sea.

“These are most likely the largest temperature anomalies on the globe for autumn,” said John Walsh of the International Arctic Research Center during a talk he gave at the conference.

Walsh said that open water on the ocean and the heat it absorbs make the Arctic a real driver of the entire world’s increased warmth during autumn and early winter, and that role will only be enhanced if sea ice on top of the globe continues to decline. He also said the open water at the end of summer may have made the region stormier.

Because the ice-free zone north of Alaska and Siberia persisted well into autumn, the ocean was able to provide the atmosphere with an extra supply of heat and moisture, the perfect ingredients for storms. Walsh said increased turbulent weather caused by open water is what climate models predict and what people observed in the Bering Sea region last fall.

Read on » » » »

The antenna array at HAARP outside Gakona
Source: HAARP

How long does it take to radio the Moon? 2.4 seconds.

Radar pulses from the HAARP research station outside Gakona in Alaska’s Copper River basin have been bounced off the moon and picked up by a radio telescope system in New Mexico — the lowest frequency radar echo from the moon ever detected on the home planet.

The signals, beamed skyward from antennas at the sometimes controversial High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, zapped the moon in a manner somewhat like sonar, and then illuminated secrets of the ionosphere as they returned to Earth.

These pulses were then caught by newly developed receivers at the Longwave Length Array in the New Mexico desert, an ongoing project to create a ground-breaking (and inexpensive) radio telescope that will listen to space for as-yet unknown low frequency signals. (Motto: “Catching Big Waves with small blades.”)

“Detecting the very weak radio signals after their round trip to the moon and back was challenging and required careful modification of the LWA antennas to improve their performance at these frequencies,” says NRL Remote Sensing Division scientist, Dr. Kenneth Stewart.

Read on » » » »