Far North Science

A sunset over Norton Sound
as seen from the village of Stebbins.
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.

STEBBINS — ”There’s no permafrost here, like there was none in Emmonak,” Kenji Yoshikawa said earlier today, when he was in the village of Kotlik. “Isn’t that interesting?”

The adventuring permafrost scientist was in that small Yupik village near the mouth of the Yukon River, drilling a hole in the soil on the treeless tundra near the school. Though the top layer of soil was frozen, a few feet down it was as gooey as cold pudding.

Yoshikawa, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was on a spring snowmachine traverse of western Alaska, from Emmonak at the mouth of the Yukon River to Native villages on Norton Sound and up to Kotzebue, tracing the nose of the Seward Peninsula. He and his helpers and traveling companions — Tohru Saito of the International Arctic Research Center and me — will try to drill 15 permafrost-monitoring holes in two weeks.

After starting in Emmonak a few days ago, we’ll make our way by snowmachine to Kotzebue, putting more than 800 miles on them.

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Hairy catsear is an invasive plant that is spreading into Alaska.
Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service.

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 only five roads connecting it to the outside world, and a small number of airports and seaports, Alaska is more like an island than the peninsula it is. That isolation has helped save Alaska from the widespread invasion of non-native plants, but exotics are finding their way in.

In 1968, Eric Hulten documented about 175 exotic plant species in Alaska. During a 2006 count of Alaska plants, researchers came up with about 275 plants new to the state. Those plants have made it into the state as their seeds have hitchhiked in on vehicles and by other means. Alaskans have also imported non-native seeds in bales of hay and potted soil.

Jeff Conn has studied the latter two pathways for weeds to gain access into Alaska. He is a weed specialist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service who also is an affiliate faculty member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Conn, Casie Stockdale, and Jennifer Morgan purchased bales of hay and straw from Alaska feed stores and then shook out the bales over screens.

After seeds fell onto the screens, they planted them, and up popped 15 weed species not known to grow in Alaska, along with 17 types that already grow here.

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Embedded iron particles surrounded by carbonized
rings in the outer layer of a mammoth tusk from
Alaska. Inset photo shows how an object ripped
through the tusk.
Image courtesy Richard Firestone.

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.

A giant meteor may have exploded over Alaska thousands of years ago, shooting out metal fragments like buckshot, some of which embedded in the tusks of woolly mammoths and the horns of bison.

Simultaneously, a large chunk of the meteor hit Alaska south of Allakaket, sending up a dust cloud that blacked out the sun over the entire state and surrounding areas, killing most of the life in the area.

Such is the scenario envisioned by Rick Firestone, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Firestone and his colleagues have found mammoth tusks and a bison skull with nickel-rich iron particles in them on one side, suggesting the metal fragments all came from the same direction.

Firestone’s theory emerged when his colleague, Alan West of Dewey, Arizona, saw at a Phoenix gem and mineral show a mammoth tusk peppered with tiny bits of metal.

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Crab Nebula
Courtesy of Neil Davis

Texans are known as braggarts, but in the arena of geography, they can’t start to compete with Alaskans who can brag about the facts that we are the biggest state, the northernmost state, the westernmost state, and the easternmost state, plus we have the longest coastline of any state, and we own the highest mountain.

We’ve also got more volcanoes, glaciers, swamps and even bigger mosquitoes than Texas, for whatever that’s worth.

However, when it comes to astronomical bragging, we don’t do so well. We do have the aurora, of course, but otherwise we are astronomically challenged on several counts.

For one thing, half the year we can’t even see the stars because of perpetual daylight. Then, for the other half of the year, it is no fun to stand out in the cold looking at them through a telescope all frosted up from the viewer’s breath.

Furthermore, stuck like we are up near the North Pole, we rotate around on the earth’s axis unable to see a great portion of the firmament, that grand spectacle containing all its galaxies filled with untold numbers of stars, planets, interstellar gases and who knows what else.

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Thar He Blows!
The white whale was a type of orca that eats only fish.
Credit: H. Fearnbach/NMML NMFS permit 782-1719

Fisheries biologists cruising the remote Aleutian Islands on a pollock survey caught sight of one of the North Pacific’s rarest creatures: a white orca.

Rather than sporting the species’ iconic black-and-white markings, the animal swimming with its fish-eating pod two miles off Kanaga Volcano exhibited almost no visible pigment, according to scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Seeing the animal’s off-white dorsal fin breaking through the roiling waves as it cavorted with its family group made for an extraordinary moment.

“With hundreds of killer whales documented around the Aleutian Islands, this was equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack,” said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist who was able to photograph the whale’s white fin and back.

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After holding water for centuries, Iceberg Lake
in the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains drained in
1999 and has lost its water every year since
except 2001.
Photo by Mike Loso.

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.

Not too long ago, a lake sprung a leak in the high country of the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains. The lake drained away, as glacier-dammed lakes often do, but this lake was a bit different, and seems to be telling a story about a warmer Alaska.

The lake, known as Iceberg Lake to people in McCarthy, about 50 airmails to the north, had been part of the landscape for as long as people could remember. Pinched by glacial ice, the three-mile-long, one-mile-wide lake on the northern boundary of the Bagley Icefield was remote but notable enough that it was the cover photo for a recent book about hiking Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

When McCarthy guide Richard Villa visited the area with a client in the summer of 1999, he was stunned to see the lake, which had lost much of its water. Villa later told Mike Loso, a Kennicott resident part of the year and now a professor at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage.

Loso flew to the lake the next summer with Bob Anderson and Dan Doak, scientists who also reside in McCarthy for part of the year. The men saw a muddy lakebed where Iceberg Lake had sat for so long.

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One of the six posters produced for the National
Academy of Sciences in 1958 to mark the last
International Polar Year, also known as the
International Geophysical Year.
Courtesy The National Academies.

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.

In 1958, Paul Newman married Joanne Woodward, the U.S. launched its first satellite, Ted Williams signed with the Red Sox for $135,000, Alaska became the 49th state, and Frank Zappa graduated from a California high school.

Fifty years ago also marked the last time scientists got together all over the world for what they called an International Polar Year. As part of that effort, a renaissance man named Hugh Odishaw, who studied English literature, math, and electrical engineering, helped put together a booklet that accompanied six National Academy of Sciences posters designed to excite people about science.

He did this task with enthusiasm for the International Polar Year, an event he thought was “the single most significant peaceful activity of mankind since the Renaissance and the Copernican Revolution.”

I saw the booklet at a science conference and started browsing it. As someone on the lookout for science stuff that’s simplified but not too dumbed-down, I appreciated Odishaw and his partners’ effort 50 years ago.

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