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.