Far North Science

Atmospheric scientist Cathy Cahill points to two
recent air samples from Baghdad, one showing
dust and the other fine trapped particles from
burned diesel fuel. 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.

Cathy Cahill got a package in the mail last week from a desert on the other side of the world. She didn’t know what was inside, but she hoped it was air samples from Baghdad. When she opened the package, she didn’t believe her eyes.

“I’ve never seen that much dust (on a slide used for air sampling),” she said. “There’s so much that it’s flaking off.”

Cahill, who works at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, studies air quality in Alaska and all over the world. In November, Pam Clark of the U.S. Army Research Lab in Adelphi, Maryland, asked Cahill if she could deploy a few air samplers at Army camps in Iraq, as part of an Army program to study the air in places where military members are stationed.

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A barred owl in Juneau. Unknown in Alaska
before the late 1970s, barred owls are now
the second most-abundant owl in Southeast.
Photo by Paul Suchanek.

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 barred owl, once a rarity in Alaska, is now one of the most common owls in Southeast Alaska. The 20-inch owl with a call that sounds like “Who cooks for me? Who cooks for you all!” is a common forest resident east of the Great Plains, but has been on the move lately.

In the 20th century, the owls expanded westward and northward, with the first documented sighting near Juneau in 1978. Michelle Kissling of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Juneau reported that researchers found about 13 barred owls from 1978 to 1990, but from 2000 to the present, they found more than 100, making the barred owl the second most common owl in Southeast.

The most common owl in Southeast is the northern saw-whet owl, which sounds like the owl version of a large truck backing up.

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Kenji Yoshikawa drills a hole to monitor permafrost
in the Seward Peninsula village of Wales.
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.

Fifteen days, 15 villages, more than 800 miles traveled by snowmachine, and Kenji Yoshikawa’s spring permafrost tour, phase 1, is complete.

From Emmonak, a village at the Yukon’s mouth where he found no permafrost, to Shishmaref, a village just south of the Arctic Circle with what he considers “cold” permafrost, Yoshikawa now has a better idea of what lies beneath western Alaska. This understanding is just in time to help other permafrost researchers flesh out a permafrost map of Alaska in time for a summer conference here in Fairbanks.

For the record, Yoshikawa found no permafrost where he drilled in villages at the mouth of the Yukon–Emmonak and Kotlik. Farther north, in Stebbins and St. Michael, he found permafrost, including “very warm” permafrost at St. Michael.

“This will be a perfect location to watch for changes in the next 10 to 15 years,” he said of St. Michael.

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The Iditarod trail between the Seward Peninsula
villages of Elim and Golovin. Kenji Yoshikawa is
traveling along part of the trail to visit schools
and install permafrost boreholes.
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.

WHITE MOUNTAIN, Alaska — The University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Kenji Yoshikawa is making a snowmachine journey from Emmonak, at the mouth of the Yukon, to Kotzebue, about 800 trail miles away. Tohru Saito of the International Arctic Research Center and I are traveling with him. Here’s how Kenji’s day went today:

7 a.m. — He wakes on the floor of the Elim school library, under a sign that says “You will not get your way when you: holler, whine, yell, ignore, demand, or lay on the floor.”

9 a.m. — Kenji tells the three junior-high-age students in a science class about permafrost, then takes them outside to look at a “frost tube,” clear surgical tubing with blue water inside that fits inside a borehole and turns cloudy when it freezes. Students will use it to tell how deep the ground freezes.

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