Far North Science

The pliosaur would have ruled the sea More images from the project
Artwork by Tor Sponga, BT

Forget Jurassic Park and those cuddly velociraptors. For a real prehistoric nightmare, check out what an international team of scientists unearthed last year in the far north Atlantic island group of Svalbard.

With jaws large to munch a modern killer whale and flippers as wide as airplane wings, this ancient marine predator would have stretched 15 meters from snout to stern — as long as a one of those mondo trailers hauled behind a semi.

So don’t blame the scientists for nicknaming the beast “The Monster.”

“After months of preparing and conserving the specimen at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo, researchers confirmed their earlier suspicions: the 150-million-year-old Jurassic marine reptile is perhaps the largest ever found,” according to the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

“This is one of the largest and relatively complete plesiosaur specimens ever found,” says earth sciences curator Patrick Druckenmiller, who spent several weeks last summer working with a Norwegian research team on the excavation.

“Its discovery in Svalbard also demonstrates that these gigantic animals inhabited the northern seas during the age of dinosaurs.”

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A lone canoeist at Ballaine Lake in Fairbanks
on a smoky summer day in 2004.
Photo by Ned Rozell, from The Climate of Alaska

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.

If you like gardening, you might scratch Barrow off your list of places to live. Alaska’s farthest north town experiences about 10 frost-free days each year. Also, you would have trouble watering your plants there, especially in 1934, when an Alaska-record low 1.4 inches of precipitation fell — all year.

In stark contrast, your broccoli would have needed an umbrella in Angoon on an October day in 1982, when 15 inches of rain fell. And you probably needed more than a shovel if you were driving through Thompson Pass at the end of December in 1955, when more than five feet of snow fell in one day.

On the bright side for Barrow, its citizens are gaining 15 minutes of sunlight every day right now, in early February, while Annette in Southeast Alaska gains just four minutes per day. And Barrow is also a great place to fly a kite; the town experiences calm conditions just one percent of the time.

I know these things because I own a copy of The Climate of Alaska , a book by Martha Shulski and Gerd Wendler, two climatologists who work for the Alaska Climate Research Center.

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The tree line is crawling up on north slopes
on the Kenai Peninsula.
Phtoto 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.

The late Yule Kilcher, a Swiss homesteader who knew the landscape around Homer better than anyone, once told ecologist Ed Berg that during Kilcher’s half century of observing the natural world around him, trees in the area had crept “at least several hundred feet” up the hills.

Two students at Alaska Pacific University recently confirmed at least part of Kilcher’s observation. They looked for changes in the tree line of the western Kenai Peninsula and found it has risen about a yard each year since 1951 on north-facing slopes. Tree line didn’t change much on south-facing slopes, but trees and bushes got denser there.

Katrina Timm and Alissa McMahon compared photos of the western Kenai hills from the 1950s to photos of the same area taken in 1996 to see the changes in tree line, which is among the most gradual and spotty indicators of warming. In comparing the photos and hiking into the hills to sample trees and take detailed measurements, the pair also found that 20 percent of the alpine tundra that existed in 1951 had become shrubbery or open woodlands by 1996.

Their results — Changes in the alpine forest-tundra ecotone commensurate with recent warming in southcentral Alaska: Evidence from orthophotos and field plots — appeared in December in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The gradual change in tree line is one of many that people have noticed on the Kenai Peninsula in recent years. The most obvious is the 1980s-to-1990s Spruce bark beetle invasion, during which the insects killed 30 million mature spruce trees on the Kenai and a wide swath of southern Alaska. (See Berg on beetles.)

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Tom Osterkamp with his Labrador retriever Happy at a permafrost
-monitoring site near Bonanza Creek west of Fairbanks in 1999.
Photo courtesy Tom Osterkamp.

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.

The trans-Alaska pipeline was a boon for welders, truck drivers and thousands of others who in the ’70s helped string the silver tube across Alaska. A permafrost scientist also saw in the bonanza a great opportunity for science.

Tom Osterkamp realized that a road traversing Alaska from north to south (to enable building and maintaining the pipeline) would allow a permafrost scientist easy access to the different types of frozen ground in Alaska — the rock-hard soil hundreds of feet thick on the North Slope, the thinner but still plentiful frozen ground north of the Yukon River, the hit-and-miss permafrost south of the Yukon, and the southernmost reaches of frozen ground near Gulkana.

Osterkamp was a permafrost researcher with the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the time of the pipeline’s construction. He received funding for a network of 100-to-200-feet-deep holes in the soil from Prudhoe Bay southward.

Osterkamp drilled most of the 16 holes along that route in 1983. To that network of “permafrost observatories,” Osterkamp added others over the years, the farthest south in Bethel. The holes, and his dutiful years of driving across Alaska to see what they told him, have given us a good snapshot of what Alaska’s permafrost has been doing for the last quarter century.

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